Zero Waste Week Success

3.28.00pm UTC (GMT +0000) Thu 6th Dec 2007

Liberal Democrat Councillors taking part in the Zero Waste Week waste challenge have recorded some impressive results after comparing the weight of their residual waste for the week before Zero Waste Week and the week of the challenge:

Cllrs Gerry Curran and Paul Crossley pre-Zero Waste Week

Councillor Week Before Zero Waste Week Number of persons in household

Paul Crossley 1.8 kg 1.1 kg 3 adults

Gerry Curran 5.0 kg 2.5 kg 2 adults, 2 children, 1 cat!

Roger Symonds 1.0 kg 1.0 kg 2 adults

Ian Gilchrist 0.8 kg 0.8 kg 2 adults

David Dixon 7.5 kg 2.5 kg 2 adults, 1 child 1 baby

Councillor Paul Crossley (Southdown) said, "It's surprisingly easy to reduce the amount of rubbish thrown away in a week, but it requires a bit of planning and thought - the buzz word is 'pre-cycling'! Excess packaging is the biggest problem and I've found the only way to reduce it is to buy unpackaged fresh food, for example from the Bath Farmers' Market.

Gerry and Paul with much less waste!

"The Liberal Democrats introduced this Council's Zero Waste policy and I'm proud that we were the first Council in the country to do so. A Zero Waste policy implies continual progress towards reducing waste. We believe more recycling should be introduced, and that incineration of waste must be resisted.

"The position of the new Council administration on waste is far from clear. The Cabinet has not yet come off the fence about the possible move towards incineration in the West of England waste partnership, and since taking power, has not introduced the food waste collections which we had planned. Furthermore the recent introduction of Tetrapak recycling trumpeted by the Cabinet is actually a temporary scheme sponsored by Tetrapak itself, in which the cartons are being sent elsewhere in the EU for processing.

"Liberal Democrats are committed to making Bath and North East Somerset the number one recycling authority in the country"