MORE CHAOS FOR WIRRAL BINS SERVICE (From Wirral Globe)

MORE CHAOS FOR WIRRAL BINS SERVICE

8:18am Wednesday 30th May 2007 in News

THOUSANDS of Wirral residents will have their combined food and garden waste bins scrapped in the latest chapter of the borough's bin saga.

Last week, council cabinet members decided to put an end to a pilot scheme allowing 18,500 residents to dispose of their kitchen and garden waste together in their brown bin.

Wirral Council says the co-mingled' scheme is not worth the small benefits it achieves through limited landfill diversion.

The changes were revealed in the week when the Globe will hand over our petition to the local authority, with thousands of readers demanding a return to their weekly bin collections In a report to cabinet, the council's technical services boss, Dave Green, said he expected residents to be "unhappy" with the scheme's withdrawal as the changes are to be rolled out across 12 of Wirral's wards.

Already, 100,000 Wirral householders have garden waste-only bins but the other 18,500 have participated in an experimental scheme mixing kitchen and garden waste together.

The Liberal Democrats, who now have control over the Streetscene and environmental portfolios, said that the co-mingled system has been "beset with problems" and stand by the decision to standardise brown bin collections to garden waste only.

"It’s unfair to accuse people of being lazy about recycling, because they’re not. They just want their regular food waste removed every week, which is what they pay their council tax for."

Gerry Ellis

Cllr Gill Gardiner said: "The trial has shown that by adding kitchen waste to green waste we are limiting the amount of green waste that we can potentially recycle, so we are not optimising the use of the In Vessel Composting plant at Bidston.

"This simply does not make best economic or best recycling use of the IVC facility.

"However, we don't intend to give up on kitchen waste recycling."

Under the new Lib Dem and Labour alliance, councillors say they will look again at the borough's bin problems that began occurring under committees formerly chaired by their Tory colleagues.

And after booting the Conservatives out of Wirral's power-share arrangement, new Lib Dem leader Simon Holbrook said that under the joint pact, work will be done to kick start the recycling and environmental agenda.

But in a report put before the new cabinet on the £10.4m contract with waste company Biffa, problems were outlined forcing Biffa to address missed bin complaints daily and compile a "full lessons learned log" to examine the issues with alternate weekly collections, which affect 94,000 homes.

Complaints have piled in since weekly bin collections were axed and a Globe campaign called upon residents to demand they be reinstated.

Next week, Hoylake Conservative councillor Gerry Ellis, who fully supports our campaign, will hand over more than 2,000 petitions to council leader Steve Foulkes.

He said: "I am not surprised at the number of petitions the Globe has received.

"It's all anyone seems to want to talk about. I've had scores of phone calls and emails and I'm constantly stopped in the street by people unhappy with the bin collections.

"It's unfair to accuse people of being lazy about recycling, because in the main they're not.

"They just want their regular food waste removed every week, which is what they pay their council tax for.

"I've already commented that there has been poor management at the council and very poor management at Biffa, and I'm sticking to that."

The bin headaches highlighted by the Globe so far include: l Collection date calendars with the wrong dates delivered to addresses in Bromborough l Deliveries of grey bins to homes in Heswall, who already had them l Missed Easter Bank Holiday collections despite bin men being on five days pay l Scores of bin bags left on Wallasey streets, after bin men who were already one week late refused to take them l Confusion over recycling after a pensioner was told that a potato was in the wrong bin - even though it wasn't.

In Winterhey Road in Poulton, Wallasey, residents say Biffa's failure to collect rubbish a fortnight ago left them last week with too much refuse for their wheelie bins.

Seacombe Cllr Adrian Jones said: "But Biffa drivers have told residents they aren't allowed to collect anything that's not in a wheelie bin.

"So what are Biffa saying?

"Their perverse rationale seems to be: Our failure to collect last week caused a backlog of refuse this week, but we can't collect the excess this week even though it wouldn't be there in the first place if we'd collected it last week.

"It's madness."