One strange thing I’ve noticed is that the 2 councils place different recycling demands on me, and other residents, and are not working in a common national agenda.
For example: we’ve all got those horrid little food recycling bins now, one in the kitchen and another that probably sits outside or in our shed for the larger collection. With such a small market in Wales you’d expect them to be the same throughout the country. One single purchase would have got the best price surely. They are not the same; both the small and large variants are different in both locations.
But then of course so are the bin bags: different colour, different printed messages, different contents accepted.
Recycling is inconsistent with bottles (beer and wine for example) being acceptable in Cardiff but not in Aberaeron. When I’ve got empty wine bottles in Ceredigion the policy is to take them to the local collection point. Consequently one can regularly see people driving to the big bins to drop off their glass. That does not seem to promote a green agenda as far as I can tell.
I accept that there are challenges to be addressed in terms of managing our recycling and I am not anti any of the efforts to manage our future better. I do however object to a small country like Wales having different implementations of such simple policies, creating decision points that don’t need to exist, working to differing local agenda and, in the final answer, wasting money that could be spent better elsewhere.
No doubt someone will claim that “we are doing so much better than them” and I commend them for that. But let’s adopt the best practice and spread it across the whole country whilst removing the need for rubbish decisions to be made at local levels and at unnecessary cost.
