Tuesday 27 July 2010

Local Blog: Daily Mail rubbishes Bracknell and Wokingham's bin spies

I'm always amazed at how upset the Daily Mail gets about the subject of rubbish. It would appear however that there is an element of truth to their story on council race spies secretly rummage through rubbish bins to discover families' habits see here.

I'm really not sure why the Daily Mail thinks this is about race as claimed in the article 'Often, officials deliberately picked streets where different types of men and women lived to see if their ethnic origins, type of home or wealth affected the amount or rubbish they threw out'. I doubt this is even possible in Bracknell.

Bracknell council have admitted that they do employ companies who will empty some bins from a random location into a separate white van to find out if that area is recycling or not. They then send leaflets to that area. the council do claim that they are not spies and that no profiling is conducted of individuals or households. Still it must be tempting after all if you know where the bin came from you may know who throw the rubbish away incorrectly.

The same article also claims that 'Officials in Wokingham, Berkshire, went through the bins of almost 500 homes, identifying almost a ton of rubbish that could have been recycled'.

There are people going through the bins in both Bracknell and Wokingham. If this is not about profiling and includes helpful leaflets to given areas than I don't see a problem with it. But I would not want someone to know that I have thrown away something personal or any ID or data and to of know where it came from.

So if you do have anything that contains important data I would not throw it away in your local bins but have it shredded before hand.

See the Get Bracknell story
http://www.getbracknell.co.uk/news/s/2075306_council_staff_are_rummaging_through_your_bins

3 comments:

  1. The Daily Mail can see race in any story. Their readers like it that way.

    If people are going through my bins it would serve them right if they came across horrible things in there!

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  2. It is said that Britain will run out of landfill space in less than eight years' time unless recycling rates increase.
    Households in the UK send more than 18.8million tonnes of rubbish to landfill every year - 2 million more tonnes than any other country in the European Union.
    Unless radical reforms are made to the amount of waste we produce and to the way we dispose of it, taxpayers will be hit hard in the pocket.
    On 1 April, landfill tax paid by councils rose to £48 per tonne. This will increase by £8 per tonne each year to 2014/15.
    By 2020, the government, and consequently taxpayers, will face fines of up to £500m a year if EU landfill targets are not met.
    There are many different techniques to make sure that as much rubbish as possible is recycled and the council will continue to work for local residents to decide which approach works best.

    THIS league table shows how we in Bracknell Forest are performing. (10th relative to the 56 other unitary authorities).
    We are fairly high up in the league tabels, but we still have got a long way to go and having got to this level of performance it is now getting ever harder to do better.

    Apparently there are instances of low take up, and a common issue is with the wrong type of waste going into the blue bins.
    There is it seems some evidence of garden waste going in the green bins only to be taken to landfill.
    This all costs us all, and is not helping our recycling rates

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  3. I understand that Alvin and I think the new recycling centre as really helped. I can give you a tip. flats, where I live people are always puting the wrong kind of things in the recycling, I do remove these items but people perhaps need more detailed and clear signs on the bins. for example drink cartoons and tetra containers. people dont relise that these can only be recycled at some super market recycing centres and not in the council bin collections

    ReplyDelete