A fiery debate shook the Good Morning Britain studios as plans by some councils to introduce one black bin collection a month were discussed. TV’s ‘Queen of Clean’ Lynsey Crombie predicted people would ‘revolt’ against the plan and it would lead to an increase in fly-tipping and people ‘hiding’ household waste in recycling.
But environmentalist Donnachadh McCarthy blasted her fears as ‘ridiculous’ and said that he puts one tiny bag of household waste in a neighbour’s bin every three months because he is so good at recycling and cutting down waste. The debate was sparked by Bristol announcing plans to become first English council to collect black bins every four weeks. The Green-led council says that switching from a two- to four-weekly collection would save it more than £2m a year and help reverse a dip in recycling rates.
The council believes it would be the first in England to move to collections every four weeks and it comes as councils around the country are being told to change how they collect bins. Speaking Donnachadh Susanna said: “You are in favour of this. How often is your rubbish put out?” Mr McCarthy said: “I haven’t had a black bin since 1994. I produce around a shopping bag of rubbish every 3 months.” Susanna asked: “OK, who lives in your house?”
He replied: “I’m a one person. So I don’t actually have a wheeliebin and the lady next door allows me to put my little bag every 3 months into her bin because actually what we need to be doing is reducing the amount of waste we’re producing. So for example, we, throw away 80 million shaving foam cans a year.
“We throw away 240 million plastic toothbrushes a year and all we need to be doing is throwing away the head and keeping the handle. So all we need to be doing is reducing the waste. Now there’s a big financial issue here. We spend £13 billion a year, the government does on throwing away our waste.
“Now that money could be used for looking after social welfare for for kids with special needs, for pensioners. Every household, Lynsey household, it costs £480 a year to deal with our waste. Now that’s between 18% and 43% of our waste. So what we need to be doing and what the real problem is they’re saying they’re reducing the bin collections to a week to once a month. They’re not. They’re going to have weekly collection for food. And a weekly collection for recycling and There’s almost nothing left.”
Lynsey asked: “What about if they’re in a household you’ve got small children and there’s nappies that need disposing of. These go in the black bin. If you’ve got there are 3 children under 5 that aren’t potty trained. Where do these go?”
Mr McCarthy said: “If you look up the story, they’re going to collect the food every week and they’re going to collect the nappies every week.” So Lynsey replied: ”You’d need another bin then for nappies bin on your driveway and that’s more mess.”
A testy Richard Madeley interjected to Donnachadh: “Just before you give us more examples of how brilliant at not creating any rubbish, and we all bow to that. Let’s just say to you that in Fife, which is the borough in Scotland where they’ve tried this out, it didn’t really work properly. They had monthly collections and after a while they’ve just found they had to have general rubbish collections every two weeks, it wasn’t working.
“And in Conwy in Wales, they found that, fly tipping has gone up by 16%.”
Donnachadh asked: “Why would fly tipping come up? Why would fly tipping is usually commercial people dumping waste.” Lynsey said: “People would just get even more lazy with this system. They’d literally be using public bins.”
Donnachadh argued back: “So you’d go out to drive go down the road and you empty it into a bin – nobody’s going to do that – that’s ridiculous.”
Lynsey said: “I think people will stop recycling. They’re gonna think there’s a space in my green bin, so I might as well put the waste that should go in the black bin in the green bin and hide it and just make the situation worse. So when it gets to the recycling centre, the job is then doubled because people are going to rebel against this system.”