It’s clear that the people of Headingley really want household glass collection. We can tell by how often we see sights like this when we are walking round the ward.
Maybe some of these boxes eventually make it to bottle banks – but for the many Headingley households which don’t have a car, that isn’t an easy option.
Elsewhere in the UK, 89% of councils now offer household glass recycling collections, including every major city. But Leeds remains behind the curve in not offering this vital service.
This is bad news for all of us. The proportion of waste recycled in Leeds has actually been falling recently, from 43.7% in 2013-14 to 42.9% in 2014-15 (the most recent figures). Councils at the top of the national league table are managing recycling rates of over 60%, so there is huge room for improvement in Leeds – and household glass collections would be an obvious way to get the rate up.
Until that happens, Leeds city council will continue paying to put unrecycled waste into landfill sites instead, costing money in local council tax. And all of us will pay the price as our environment degrades – both through the excess waste and through the traffic emissions caused by hundreds of individual journeys to bottle banks.