http://www.guardian .co.uk/environme nt/2008/jun/ 23/waste. pollution? commentpage= 1
'I'm waiting for riots in the streets'

Britain is at war over rubbish. Exasperated householders are attacking refuse
collectors and stealing their neighbours' bins. What's going on? Why can't we
change our dirty habits? And since when was waste such an emotive issue anyway?
Jon Henley reports

* Jon Henley
* The Guardian,
* Monday June 23, 2008

Black bin bags and rubbish

Normal black bin bags and rubbish on Islington side of Southgate Road.
Photograph: Linda Nylind

It's starting to get nasty out there. In Preston, the Lancashire Evening Post
reports, refuse collectors have recently come under a barrage of abuse from
householders furious at "changes to the way their rubbish is collected". In some
cases, it appears, residents have hurled burst and stinking bin bags, forcing
bin men to flee.

In Lynn, west Norfolk, according to the Lynn News, long-suffering refuse
operatives have been "verbally and physically abused at least three times in the
past month". Residents angry that overfull wheelie bins are not being emptied
have been warned in no uncertain terms to cease attacking bin men or face
prosecution.

In normally staid Cannock, meanwhile, the Birmingham Post relates that decent,
law-abiding family men, unable to cope now the council has switched to
fortnightly collections, have been seen stealing into their neighbours' gardens
at dead of night and nicking their wheelie bins. "It's like something out of Mad
Max," says resident Paul Nicholls. "Every man for himself, scavenging for an
extra bin."

We are in the grip, it would appear, of a national crisis. "I'm waiting for the
riots in the streets," Doretta Cocks of the Campaign for Weekly Waste
Collection, which has grown from nothing to 22,000 highly vocal members in the
space of three years, says ominously. "Though in fact, in some places we've
already had them. An awful lot of people are very, very angry."

The object of all this ire, rather oddly, is household waste: how we collect it,
how we dispose of it, how much of it we reuse. The trouble is, we're rubbish at
rubbish. Or at least, we were. In 2000, we were bottom of the European league
table: only Portugal and Greece dumped more stuff in holes in the ground (the
technical term is landfill) than we did. We were recycling barely 5% of what we
threw out; the likes of Holland, Germany and Switzerland were at 60%.

Over the past few years, however, stimulated by the prospect of swingeing
£180m-a-year EU fines and dire warnings that if we carry on as we are, all of
our island's landfill sites will be completely full within the next eight or
nine years, we have started to get a bit better. Unfortunately, it's proving to
be a painful process.

"I'm afraid change is unpopular," says Phillip Ward, director of the Waste
Resources Action Programme (Wrap - get it?), the government's chief advisory
body on the issue. "We're moving from an easy, familiar system where we just
slung everything into a sack and once a week someone came and took it away for
us - we neither knew nor cared where - to one where we actually have to do
something. Some people will always find that difficult, for whatever reason."

Judging by the media coverage, to say that some people are finding it difficult
may be something of an understatement. The following, for example, is a by no
means complete list of the principle rubbish rage incidents reported by the
conservative press in recent weeks:

· In Broxbourne, Herts, the local council has begun rationing households to one
officially approved, free purple bin bag a week and is charging 28p for each
extra one; residents who continue to use black bags face a possible £1,000 fine.

· Mid-Sussex council, for its part, has employed "snoopers to sift through
residents' rubbish" and see exactly how much they throw away. "It's a gross
invasion of privacy," fumes one opposition councillor.

· In Bolton, Zoe Watmough has been fined £275 for daring to put her rubbish out
the day before it was due to be collected.

· Poor Katie Shergold of Warminster, Wiltshire, has been told her bin was too
heavy to be emptied because collectors could not move it with two fingers.

· Plucky June Key, 80, who lives in Bolton-by-Bowland, Lancashire, is now
supposed to drag her wheelie bin "half a mile down a steep hill" for collection
by the cold, uncaring operatives of Ribble Valley council. "I don't know how I'm
supposed to manage," says June. "I'm too old."

· Gareth Corkhill of Whitehaven, Cumbria, has been fined £225 because his bin
was too full and its lid raised by four inches (or seven - there is some
dispute). It would have been considerably cheaper, Gareth complained, just to
"dump the rubbish in the garden and get done for fly-tipping" .

· And in the ultimate affront to all right-thinking Englishmen, Colin Harrold, a
war veteran, was ordered to pay £70 by Scarborough council after he was foolish
enough to "put his rubbish out in the wrong colour bag".

Why, though, have we suddenly become so inordinately touchy about what happens
to our waste? Why is rubbish, of all things, the new hobbyhorse of middle
England? In part, suggests Cocks, because one of the marks of a civilised
society is its capacity to deal with its waste. In part, too, because refuse
collection is just about the one service used by every household in a borough;
draconian new collection schemes tend to be seen merely as an attempt to get
away with doing less in return for an already exorbitant council tax bill.

In part, also, because we do not take kindly to being told what to do at the
best of times - and never by town hall officials. "We used to be clients," she
observes persuasively, "and the council was there to provide a service. Now
we're the persecuted. We're an easy target, you see. And all we want to do is
get rid of our rubbish. It can't be that difficult, can it?"

In fact, though, rubbish has reached the top of our collective agenda
principally because boroughs, driven by government targets and financial
penalties for failing to meet them, find themselves having to substantially
increase the amount this country recycles. Having raised that proportion to 33%
in eight years, Britain - along with the rest of the EU - is now looking at a
target of recycling 50% of its household waste by 2020. That means sending a lot
less to landfill, which means changing people's habits.

Now there are, of course, many ways to change people's habits. You can inform
them of the benefits of a new behaviour pattern, and trust that their rapid
comprehension and generous goodwill will induce them to cooperate by recycling
more of their paper, glass, cans, cardboard, plastic and food and garden waste
than they do at present.

Then, when everyone who is willing to cooperate is doing so, you have to address
the change-averse, by obliging them to recycle more. One obvious and highly
cost-effective way to do this, local authorities argue, is to take steps to
constrain the amount of residual, ie non-recyclable, waste that householders
produce and that you collect. This is the stage that many English local
authorities have now reached. Some of them (see Broxbourne, above) have begun
providing smaller or fewer bags for residents' landfill rubbish. Others (nearly
half in fact; around 180 authorities at the last count) have moved instead to
what is known in the waste trade as AWC, or Alternate Weekly Collection.

As the name suggests, this implies that they now collect recyclables only one
week, and non-recyclables only the next. In both cases, a whole lot of new rules
are attached to the scheme in order to make sure it works. For householders who
don't recycle as much or as sensibly as they might, that unfortunately means
being landed, in the worst instances, with an overflowing, malodorous and
maggot-infested bin. Plus, if they're really lucky, a fine.

For some people, this is self-evidently a national scandal. "It's a national
scandal," says Cocks, whose campaign is based on public health concerns and
dedicated to eradicating the scourge of AWC. "In public health terms we're
moving back to the middle ages. In this climate we need a weekly collection of
all waste otherwise you get maggots, flies, rats, the lot. I've had horror
stories: one man had to use a blowtorch to get the maggots off his driveway.
This country first introduced weekly refuse collections under the Public Health
Act of 1875 precisely to break the breeding cycle of the house fly; now we're
getting rid of them. It's beyond absurd."

For others, it's the only way forward. "The bin fairy is dead," proclaims a
breezy Paul Bettison, Tory leader of Bracknell Forest borough council and, as
chairman of the Local Government Association' s environment board, the nation's
number one bin baron (or, if you prefer, trash tsar). "From now on we're all
going to have to do a little bit of her work, and that's all there is to it. And
in any case, the maggot problem is almost invariably exaggerated. "

Bettison relates, with some relish, the entertaining story of a mystery series
of photos of wheelie bins overrun with flies and maggots that appeared in his
local newspaper soon after Bracknell Forest first introduced AWC. "We had a
young ranger on the team who had a degree in entymology or some such," Bettison
says, "and he had a good look at the pictures and he said, 'Those are not the
maggots of any fly found in Great Britain.'

"So he investigated further, and he found that they were in fact a breed of
maggot particularly favoured by fishermen. So this householder had gone out and
bought a load of maggots from the bait shop, and emptied them into his wheelie
bin. Just goes to show the lengths some people will go to avoid change. It was
just the same when we introduced wheelie bins, mind: I got more hate mail that
summer than I've ever had before or since."

According to Bettison, the key to the problem is good communication, and an
understanding that one solution will not fit all circumstances. "AWC has been
shown to boost recycling rates by 30%," he says. "It won't work everywhere; it
may not be appropriate in areas with a very high proportion of flats, multiple
occupancy, that kind of thing. But where it is appropriate you just need to
educate people properly. Look, anyone calls us up to complain they can't fit all
their rubbish in their non-recyclables bin, we offer to send someone round and
empty it onto a tarpaulin in their garden, show them what they could have
recycled. They don't have to do it very often."

But still, some council behaviour has been a tad over the top, wouldn't you say?
Not exactly guaranteed to engender the full and willing cooperation of the great
British public.

At Wrap, Ward accepts part of the problem is that, as it so often is when rapid
change is introduced, "not always done in the optimum way". Waste recycling in
Britain, he stresses, is still very much a work in progress: "You have to
realise we had no stock of people who knew how to do it. A lot of mistakes have
been made along the way." Nor has it necessarily helped, he acknowledges, that
some 300 different local authorities, all independent and all with their own
ideas, are in charge.

Nowhere is what Ward calls this "confusing patchwork of exactly what is
collected, when, and in what receptacles" more evident than in one corner of
north London. On the boundary between the boroughs of Islington and Hackney,
Southgate Road is a fine street: busy, but not excessively so; big handsome
houses, not all converted into flats; a couple of decent-looking pubs. And
outside every front door, a magnificent display of assorted bins, bags and
recycling boxes.

On the Islington side of the road, residents can choose between brown boxes
(kitchen waste), green boxes (paper, glass, cans, cardboard, plastic bottles),
black bin bags (non-recyclable refuse), and grey sacks (garden waste). That all
gets collected on Fridays.

On the Hackney side, there are green boxes (paper, glass, etc), blue boxes
(kitchen waste), and black bin bags or dustbins (other refuse), all for
collection on Tuesdays. Plus brown wheelie bins (garden waste, alternate
Tuesdays). Friends of the Earth last week dubbed Southgate Road "the most
confusing street in the country for waste collection".

Mark Penbury, one resident, agrees: "It is a bit of a nightmare," he says. "You
want to do the right thing, but people inevitably get muddled and put stuff in
the wrong bin, or leave it out on the wrong day, then it gets left there and
stinks. I think it could be made a bit easier." Agnes, from Poland, is more
forthright: "It's completely crazy. How do they expect people to do it right?
And of course, you make a mistake, you can't argue with them. No way."

It's the kind of situation that drives Cocks mad. Most people, she believes, now
understand that we need to recycle more, for economic as well as environmental
reasons (according to Bettison's figures, the UK sends as much rubbish to
landfill as the 18 EU countries with the lowest landfill rates combined, and
every tonne of waste that gets recycled in future will save local authorities as
much as £80 in landfill taxes and fees).

"Most of us are on board," Cocks says. "Most of us are prepared to do our bit.
But I can't tell you the number of emails I get from people saying they're
giving up - they're afraid of being fined, they don't understand the rules,
they've been upset once too often, they can't use their back garden because of
the swarm of flies round the rubbish bins. It's all too complicated, and too
fiercely enforced. People end up driving their rubbish to the tip or the
recycling centre themselves - how environmentally friendly is that? They're
trying to educate us into change, but they're ending up alienating us."

The bin baron's riposte is typically robust. "To those who say they can't do
it," says Bettison, "I say they have to. The days of easy waste disposal are
over. No change is not an option. To those who say it's too complicated, I say
it really isn't rocket science. To those who say waste food smells, if you've
got a garden, there are ways of reducing kitchen waste to little more than
water, at home. It all just takes a bit of extra effort, that's all - and it
should even lead to lower council tax bills."

Across at Wrap, Defra adviser Ward promises that things will get easier. Wrap is
about to start a major public consultation process around just what constitutes
a good recycling service, with the aim not only of "really making it work for
everyone" but convincing sceptics that materials really are being recycled, not
secretly dumped.

"And we need more uniformity," he says. "We need to refine further exactly what
is collected for recycling, and coalesce around maybe five or six different
models. There are too many at present; it is confusing." But to approach future
recycling targets, he warns, "more motivation, more incentivisation" is going to
be needed. We could soon be looking at pay-as-you-throw systems and, once
recycling has really taken off, even at once-a-month residual rubbish
collections. That, I imagine, really will be fun.