From the Berrylands Front

A Berrylands resident, struggling with the current recycling ‘trial’ has written about his experiences to Surbiton Conservative councillors as follows:-

It is early Friday morning and my wife and I have had our knuckles rapped; we have had another telling off !  Our misdemeanour?  Well! It is like this:-

In our enthusiasm to save the planet and do our bit we put all our plastic rubbish in a receptacle for just that, plastics !   However, it’s the wrong sort of plastics !  ( That is only one of our crimes ) -but to continue – In order to reinforce the chastisement letter the police included an RBK publication which listed the various types of plastic.  There are seven different types.  Each type has a comment of “yes please” or “no thank you”,  Out of those seven only two are “yes please”s.  By simple calculation I have worked out that this council is unable to recycle getting on for three quarters of all plastics. It would seem that we have to look for a recyclable logo, decide, then discard as appropriate.

Up before the “Beak” I would explain that I am streets; years ahead of the council in that I am sorting and putting out for recycling plastics that this council has not yet began to work out how to recycle.

Another paragraph on the RBK publication tells us that supermarkets can recycle our discarded plastic shopping bags for absolutely nothing.Yes ! Nothing. But our council is unable to recycle them even though that is one of the things for which we pay our council tax. 

This means that I appear to be recycling less. OK ! So I am a recycling fanatic. Over sixty years ago in my childhood I was making model railway engines out of empty, discarded cornbeef tins and in more recent times I could be seen joining the end of a queue – which frequently now extends way down Villiers Road – to get into the recycling centre to properly discard my unwanted refuse.         But !   Can’t you just hear those councillors who are quite unable to improve recycling rates saying.  “Right ! This is what we will do. We will give all the Berrylands residents a whole miscellaneous collection of containers for rubbish. That will make it look as though we are serious about recycling then we will follow that with some bin police who will write officious letters about every little mistake to the residents to make them believe that our inability to improve recycling is all their fault.”

   – and that is only about plastics.  Multiply that by paper, cardboard, wood, glass, metal, kitchen waste; -but they are other stories which I might keep for another day.

Paradoxically all this belligerence occured on the one day in the fortnight when all of our rubbish was supposed to be cleared.