Fly Tipping
That's an unpleasant title, isn't it? So is the subject itself. Fly tipping makes the place look a mess, there's no question about that (although if you're on the lookout for stuff that you can re-use, following the advice of the wombles, it's a gold mine).
What, however, is the best way to deal with it?
Well, I saw in the local rag yesterday a piece that Cardiff Council plans to spend £20,000 on CCTV at popular fly-tipping sites to try and catch the nefarious types, along with a battery of other expensive measures.
Dear Cardiff Council, here's a clue:
The best way to combat fly tipping is to make it easier to legitimately dispose of your waste than to fly-tip it.
- At fly-tipping hotspots, and this is a real innovation; leave a skip for people to put rubbish in!
- If someone's bin if full to bursting, it means that they have a lot of rubbish and it needs collecting. Leaving their bin, full, at the kerbside is utterly counter-productive and a danger to public health.
- Make municipal dumps easier to use (like not requiring people to own cars to be able to use them). There's a dump around the corner from where I live, apart from very bulky items, it would be possible to walk around there with rubbish, but we have to drive instead - if we didn't own a car, we simply wouldn't be able to dump our rubbish.
- Stop charging for commercial waste disposal - it's rubbish, it goes in the dump, that's what dumps are for. Making it hard for people to do that (by charging a really substantial amount of money) is going to make it harder to get by without fly-tipping - legitimate tradesmen who do things properly have to pass that cost on to their customers, who are now more likely to go with the cheaper option of using cowboys.
- Structure your recycling rules such that if in doubt, you put things in the green bag, rather than the black one.
- When people call up to get bulky items collected, have enough capacity to be able to offer them an appointment within 24-36 hours, rather than next week. Most people don't want an old sofa to sit in their front garden for a week before it's collected. Nor do they want dangerous items like old fridges to sit around any longer than necessary.