What about fines when our recycling goes uncollected?

Published: 18th March, 2011

• IT was with interest that I saw a poster on a bus stop informing me that as from April 4 Islington will introduce compulsory recycling for households (although for some reason it isn’t compulsory for businesses, schools, charities or other non-household organisations to recycle). There is a chance that you can be fined if you do not recycle everything that is possible, as listed by Islington.

This raises the question that has been asked by many residents on Popham 1 estate: what do we put all this in? At present we have either a small green box or a small blue bag. A lot of the time, these are not big enough, and a lot of the time Enterprise does not collect recycling on our estate that is not in these “official containers”.

When I spoke to council leader Catherine West about this in December last year, I suggested that if she was going ahead with this scheme then Islington should follow Havering’s lead.

There, all residents are delivered free (sorry, Islington, that’s a swear word to you) packs of orange sacks with pictures of what can be recycled on them. Further supplies can be picked up at libraries. This way everyone has plenty of space to recycle and the recycling is easily visible to  collectors and only the orange sacks are collected.

Councillor West ignored my letter to her following our discussion. I also sent her an example sack.

As for fines, is this a two-way fine? If residents are going to be fined for not recycling, then can residents claim when recycling is not collected (on our estate there have been nine missed recycling collections in the last six months) or claim when Enterprise drops the recycling over walkways without clearing it up? I think I know the answer to this.

I am all for recycling, but as with anything in life, the right tools of the trade must be there first.
Martin Rutherford
Secretary, Popham 1 Estate Tenants’ and Residents’ Association