It's hard to see how an inner city borough like Camden can charge residents by weight for the waste they produce because most of us live in multiple occupancy buildings and it’s virtually impossible to separate our bins. Penalising people for producing more waste, or for not recycling, is likely to lead to more fly tipping and a lot of ill feeling.
Most of our waste starts as packaging and comes from supermarkets like Tesco. They need to be persuaded to reduce their packaging and to use materials that can be composted. We also need to be tougher as consumer. We should refuse plastic bags wherever possible, complain when checkout assistants push plastic bags at us, and leave excess packaging at the checkout as they do in Germany.
Finally we need to reuse things a lot more than we do currently. I visited Cambridgeshire County Council last week to see how they pushed their recycling rate up to 50%. (Camden is at 27%.) Part of it is about collecting kitchen waste which we definitely need to do. But the Council also has a great free website which allows residents to advertise things they would like to swap or pass on. If you have any good ideas like that, then please let me know. The Camden Sustainability Task Force, a cross-party body of councillors concerned about Climate Change, will incorporate the best ideas into our next report – on Waste and Recycling – which is due out in July.
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