I recently spent a half day with Cabinet Member Councillor Scott Roche and the Veolia recycling team, which included conversations both with their management at the Stubbs Mead depot and several of their recycling teams out on the street collecting recycling from residents. I was impressed with their commitment to providing a good service.
Veolia makes 258,128 collections in Croydon every week, which brings in 135,000 tonnes of waste. That is a big task.
With so many collections, some mistakes are bound to be made, but it is in the interest of all of us that these are kept to a minimum. Talking both to residents and the contractor, there are common themes. Contaminated recycling and missed collections are top of the list.
Detailed information on what goes in which recycling bin can be found on the Council’s website. It is worth a look because I found on my way round that I was not fully up to speed. Some of the points that came out regarding recycling were:
- Plasticised coffee cups are not recyclable by the Council. They should be put in the landfill bin. Best of all, drop them off at either Costa Coffee or Starbucks both of whom will recycle these receptacles even if they are from another vendor. The plastic lid is recyclable by the Council. It can be put in the plastics bin.
- Plastic bags such as black bin bags or supermarket shopping bags should not be put into the recycling bins, either the paper or the metals/plastic bin. They are a contaminant to both. Please empty the contents of the bag into the bin and dispose of the bag itself elsewhere.
- Please crush or flatten cardboard boxes before putting them in the bin. Bins soon get filled if the boxes are placed unflattened into the bin.
- Pizza boxes are a severe contaminant due to the oily residue from the pizza. They are not recyclable and should be disposed of in the landfill bin.
- Shredded paper is not recyclable in the paper bin. It clogs up the equipment further down the recycling chain.
- Do not mix landfill and recycling in a landfill bin. It is particularly damaging if bags of landfill are placed in a recycling bin and then covered up with genuine recyclates. This can result in the entire lorry load being contaminated.
Croydon does rather well on recycling but there is still room for improvement. Let’s aim to do even better.
Missed collections are a particular frustration for residents. When a missed collection is reported via the Council’s web site (preferably) or via the help desk it goes directly to Veolia. Veolia treat this as a priority. There are some ways where residents can help:
- Veolia start very early in the morning so to avoid being missed put your bins out the night before.
- Only report the specific bin whose collection has been missed. If a different bin is reported as having been missed, Veolia may send the wrong collection vehicle. This may result in an extra journey to no effect. Veolia vehicles do only three miles to the gallon, so wasted journeys are very damaging to the environment as well as costly.
If your collection has been missed do report promptly. If there is a persistent issue with missed collections even after reporting them, then please get in touch.
It is in all our interests to improve our recycling rate, avoid missed collections and minimise the cost and damaging to the environment from rectifying errors. If we all do our part we can both reduce costs and make a positive difference to our environment.
