A quote to start… shock horror, I know.
“Recycling is defined by the action and not by the material”
Oh-ho really Birmingham? So, does that mean…? Surely not…
“Donating clothes to a charity is a reuse activity as the waste will be reused in its original form, i.e. as clothing”
So. Basically. An indeterminable amount of ‘recycling’ recorded and counted across Birmingham, and a massive reason for the increased numbers, is people donating clothes to charity. I’ll elaborate, with more from the FOI;
“Recycling is basically putting the material through a process which reuses it instead of using more virgin materials to make a product which may be the same as or different from the original product (e.g. recycling metal from food cans into cars)”
I was misinformed, rather than believe that Birmingham City Council are being sneaky.
No wonder recycling rates have soared.
I, as a member of the public and an enviromental journalist didn’t know about this, so how can the public?
They can’t even see the statistics at all.
I think this is bad times.
More to come.
Posted by Paul Bradshaw on May 7, 2010 at 9:49 am
Sounds like you need to drill down to the actual data to see if they’ve separated it out at all.
Posted by owmyfoothurts on May 7, 2010 at 3:15 pm
that’s my next plan after digging into the police, amongst other things.
any decent places to look in the mean-time before i construct another FOI?
Posted by Lorna langdon on May 7, 2010 at 6:28 pm
Can the council assure us that the household recycling rate doesn’t include any trade/commercial waste recycling as well? If so, how? The bring sites allow trade wastes to be deposited in them such as glass bottles from pubs, paper and cardboard wastes from offices and retail outlets for example, as they are not secure sites and there is open access for anyone to use them. Could there be an argument to remove these bring sites, as there is now a comprehensive household kerbside collection service? This might save the council some money, as well as removing the possibility for the household recycling rate to be completely incorrect due to an unknown level of commercial waste recycling being included in the figures as well…Unless there can be certaintly that absolutely no trade waste recycling is included in the household recycling rate, the figures are meaningless and can not be taken seriously.
Posted by owmyfoothurts on May 7, 2010 at 6:37 pm
It’s next on my to-do list to look in further; the council can’t assure us of anything in their statistics really.
Charity donations being included under the terms of recycling is one thing, but household vs commercial is a totally different matter that skews the results just as powerfully.
A lot of fancy wording for the near future, I feel…
Posted by Ok, so here’s the plan… Recycling in Birmingham and ass-kicking time. « Recycling and Birmingham. Hand in shaky hand. on May 8, 2010 at 6:28 pm
[...] seperate the charity collections and actual household recycling figures, and make sure to avoid the commercial recycling figures (again, thank you to Lorna for pointing this [...]
Posted by Birmingham City Council and Recycling Part 1; The stats… « Recycling and Birmingham. Hand in shaky hand. on May 14, 2010 at 2:33 pm
[...] « Right then, guys, girls… machines… It’s FOI time. Ish. That Birmingham City Council FOI Part 2; Recycling figures and indeterminate terms… [...]