News

.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

12 April 2007

Why has Dover District Council got such a lousy record on waste recycling and why should my constituents have to put up with a service which is simply below par and – judging by last week’s revelation – looks doomed to get worse ?

At a time when even members of the flat earth society are recognising the need to accelerate the switch from land-fill waste sites to recycling, our Council is still struggling to meet the minimum targets set by Government. In fact, until last month they were repeatedly failing to meet the very modest 18% recycling target at a time when other Councils are consistently managing to recycle up to 50% of their waste.

The casual observer could be forgiven for believing that Dover’s Conservative administration is doing much better than they are because they keep trumpeting their tiny achievements in their press releases. For instance in 2005, at the very time that the independent Audit Commission was condemning them for not achieving the minimum Government targets and criticising them for failing to roll-out kerbside recycling across the District – the Council was telling us what a great job they were doing. Two years later they still haven’t achieved doorstep recycling across the District but they are still crowing about their performance.

In the middle of February they issued a press release saying that their scheme was expanding to cover 80% of the District. In the middle of March they published a further release repeating the 80% claim but by the end of March we learned that all recycling of plastics for the whole of the District was being abandoned. That news didn’t appear in any of their press releases of course and up until yesterday DDC’s web site was still proudly proclaiming that their Whitfield, Deal and Richborough tips were receiving plastics for recycling – not true.

When I complained to Kent County Council about stopping this facility without any discussion or consultation they said that it was no longer viable to collect plastic bottles from their transfer stations because most District Councils in East Kent had adopted kerbside collections and thus the volume of plastic arriving at the sites had diminished.

To some extent this is understandable but it only serves to put in focus our local Council’s dismal performance because unlike our neighbours in Canterbury, Thanet, Folkestone and Hythe - Dover’s limited kerbside recycling scheme still doesn’t accept plastics so for my constituents, it looks like a return to landfill.

One of the areas which make up the much heralded expansion of their kerbside recycling is Clarendon in the Priory Ward where I visited on Tuesday. The new system was supposed to start on March 5th but I’m told the Council ran out of black boxes and then found that their new refuse lorries were too big to negotiate the local roads. So Clarendon residents, like thousands of others in this District are still waiting for kerbside recycling and wondering what to do with all those empty plastic bottles.