We are currently busy delivering our latest Focus leaflet in Headingley. You may have received yours already. If not, it should reach you soon.
Note: we aim to deliver a Focus leaflet to every household in Headingley, but of course some addresses are inaccessible (e.g. flats with entry codes), and sometimes we just run out! That’s why we put our stories online as well. You can browse through them by following our ‘focus stories’ category.
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.
Leeds Liberal Democrats have accused the Labour-led Council of lacking ambition after Labour bosses announced they plan to reduce their recycling target.
Local Liberal Democrat campaigner Penny Goodman said:
Reducing and re-writing recycling targets is not how to improve sustainability and the environment in our city. Instead it shows a lack of ambition to improve.
From talking to local residents I know that people want to recycle more – residents repeatedly ask me for doorstep glass and food recycling as exists elsewhere.
Instead of playing with the numbers in reports, Labour should be taking this sort of practical action to improve recycling. Then they would not need to re-write targets, we would reach them!
Food waste and glass can be recycled in many other cities – but not Leeds.
Twelfth night is drawing near, but St. Gemma’s Hospice will take the hassle out of Christmas tree disposal for all LS6 residents. In return for a small donation to the hospice, they will come and collect your tree from the roadside on Thursday 7th, Friday 8th and Saturday 9th January 2016.
Just fill in the form here to make your donation and let them know where to collect your tree.
