At East Suffolk Council’s Full Council meeting last week, the Conservative Group were quick to highlight the faults in a hastily designed new waste collection format to meet national requirements for 2026.
Much work had commenced in looking at how East Suffolk would change its waste collections and before the Greens and Lib Dems took over the Council, pilot schemes were in the pipeline and the whole Council, cross-party, were focusing on the best outcome for our residents. However, since the Greens and Lib Dems have taken power, there is little cross-party working, and the administration is rubber stamping decisions that are clear to everyone have been made behind closed doors.
Nobody would argue that recycling is more important than ever with increasing climate change concerns and improvements can be made in East Suffolk, but the current administration seems to forget the most important aspect of these changes will be how easy they are to follow for busy households.
The new plans will mean more bins and greater congestion on pavements. The plastic bins which are not only unsightly in many of our Victorian roads, are simply the wrong type of collection vessel. We all understand the need to move away from plastic not use it more in our everyday lives. The proposed sorting at home is not practical, where will all these bins be stored? The proposals as they stand will be highly challenging to many of our residents especially the elderly and those with mobility issues. The key aspect in recycling is to reduce the contamination to a minimum. If bins are contaminated it becomes residue waste and is just burnt or worse still goes to land fill and that’s just throwing away the hard work of household sorting and collecting material in the first place.
Conservative Environment spokesperson Cllr Mallinder said: ‘I am really surprised and disappointed there hasn’t been a cross-party committee established to guide Cabinet and Full Council. These changes will have such a huge impact to our residents, this needs a proper debate. From the result at Wednesday’s meeting the proposal only just passed so it is clear the Council as a whole is not happy with the direction the Greens are taking this policy.’
Cllr Mallinder continued: ‘The proposed three-week collection of residual waste – the black bag collection - is not acceptable. Not only in the summer months will it lead to smells and encourage vermin, but we will also clearly see a knock-on effect of residents using pavement bins and frankly just fly tipping waste. The Conservatives are asking the Council to think again from changing the collection from every two weeks to every three. Yes, we need to get better at recycling, but we should not be littering our pavements with more bins, increasing the carbon footprint of the Council and causing a huge confusion for our residents. ‘
