In the latest mountain of waste industry news that we’ve been reading through carefully, we couldn’t help but notice the exciting news regarding London recycling investments. It seems as if the London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB) will be providing £1,200,000 to nearly twenty London boroughs to allow them to improve their recycling efforts. This is part of the ‘Driving Up Performance Fund’. As we have spoken about in the past, the rates of recycling in London have recently been dropping so we welcome this new commitment towards a more sustainable future for the metropolis.
It is thought that this could impact upon the lives of 1,000,000 households. Even if only half of these London households make use of the new resources at their disposal then there should be significantly less waste going to landfill or being burned. The overall plan is to effectively give a new lease of life to current recycling centres whilst also adding to the list of services they are able to offer. The LWARB has already made it clear that some of this will help improve the levels of food and WEEE waste being recycled.
Picture taken by Jamie McCaffrey, unedited, Attribution 2.0 Generic.
Ultimately this boils down to the authorities trying to make recycling – and proper waste management in general – as simple as possible. We have always made it very clear how important this actually is because in our experience of rubbish removal in London it’s often the smallest of things that stop people from recycling. The thought of things like big queues at the local tip turns many people off even the idea of hopping in their car with, say, their garden rubbish piled high in the boot. This sort of funding should help streamline the process and make it more appealing.
To us it was particularly significant that some of the money was going towards trying to improve food recycling rates because in London the effects of waste food are particularly unpleasant. Rats thrive upon an unbalanced diet of pizza crusts, restaurant scraps and vegetable peelings and most users of the London Underground will see exactly how well fed they are! Foxes are also a major problem. In the mornings our drivers regularly report of seeing food waste strewn across the roads of Lambeth, Wandsworth and Kensington. This is evidence of where hungry foxes have been busy digging their way into a bin liners full of all sorts of rubbish just to find a piece of smelly food the size of walnut! The more food waste we can recycle the more hygienic our streets should become.
Anyway, the JunkWize team will be sure to keep an eye out for what actually materialises from this extra funding boost. With any luck we will witness a more sustainable London emerge.
