Sunday, August 26, 2007

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.

  1. At fly-tipping hotspots, and this is a real innovation; leave a skip for people to put rubbish in!
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Structure your recycling rules such that if in doubt, you put things in the green bag, rather than the black one.
  6. 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.
See; simple, sensible, solutions - I suppose that means that there's no chance of the council employing me now :-(