Dorset Council spending £187,000 a year teaching us to use the right bin!
And we're still getting it wrong
Dorset Council is spending more than £187,000 a year persuading people to use the correct bins for their recycling.
Cabinet member for customer and community services Jill Haynes says it is disappointing that people have still not got the message after a number of years.
She says that putting the wrong things in the bins costs the council more because staff then have to manually re-sort it.
The £187,250 annual spend, listed as “Behavioural change – Right Stuff Right Bin Campaign” was highlighted as a possible saving during a discussion on the council’s proposed budget for next year.
Cllr Haynes said people consistently put the wrong items in their bins despite the scheme running for several years. She said some residents continued not to use their food caddy at all and were putting food waste into their main bin, even hiding it at the bottom underneath other rubbish.
She said the campaign money ought to remain in the budget because it was necessary. She said if the message could be got across it would produce savings in the long run: “It is a lot of money, but it’s a heck of a cost if we have to re-sort manually,” she said.
She told the scrutiny committee that the council was currently experimenting with an additional bin in some areas which people could use for items they were uncertain about, which was helping the understanding of what items people were getting confused about and might inform future ‘right bin’ campaigns.
Cllr David Tooke said the issue was not helped by supermarkets putting ‘widely recycled’ labelling on their products which encouraged residents to think that just about anything could be recycled – although this was not always the case in Dorset and differed from county to county.
He said examples included thin wrapping on food which could not be recycled, although the carboard or plastic base often could be, and drink/soup cartons which should not be put into the doorstep recycling boxes although most of the cartons were labelled as being capable of being recycled and were taken in other areas.