Star comment: Are bin police rubbish or required?
If you are about to chuck that milk carton, you may want to think about which bin you are going to put it in.
Apparently, after a visit by them, they do. According to Telford & Wrekin Council, indications are that things show a significant improvement once this flying squad – part of a wider campaign to tackle fly-tipping – has had a reconnoitre.
Some promising early results, then. Surveys regularly show that litter and fly-tipping are high on the list of residents’ concerns. Those who make a mess of their communities harm the quality of life of everybody else.
Ten areas of Telford are being targeted for being particularly bad, principally in Woodside and Brookside.
Experience in other areas suggests that there are going to be mixed feelings about this approach.
Clearing up areas, promoting pride in communities, and cracking down on fly-tipping are all things which residents will find easy to support.
If offenders do not respond to warnings, and find themselves being hit by fines, then they have only themselves to blame.
But when you get to the sorting of rubbish for recycling, attitudes may initially at least become a little more frosty. There will no doubt be some people who feel that this smacks of Big Brother and is an unwarranted and over-the-top intrusion.
But it is not really all that long ago that all rubbish went in the same bin, and binmen would walk onto your property every week to haul the metal bins on their backs and dump them in the bin lorry.
How things have changed. Now householders are expected to sort all their refuse and categorise it. What the council once did, householders now have to do – all unpaid, of course.
That is something that is now accepted and even embraced by most people. There is widespread recognition that recycling is making a positive contribution to the future of our planet.
Given this trend, therefore, it is not that surprising that the next step is for householders who repeatedly put the wrong items into the wrong bins to be taken aside and given some advice.
And for every one who says it is all getting too much, there will be plenty who say we are still not doing enough.
