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Wed 16 Nov 2011, 11:48
Oh help !! I've been here before so many times. I have no interest in defending the indefensible and, as we have a Tory WODC, I have no personal axe to grind (except that I was--and am--on the Environment committee which helped to develop the new waste contract. Still, as your district councillor I do feel a certain duty to try and put the record straight (or at least slightly straighter !)
Firstly---we do, I think, have a very good waste and recycling programme. It was designed mainly to increase recycling and reduce landfill and the statistics show it has been hugely successful in that---which, you would surely admit, is the main thing. We are one of the top five authorities in the country in the amount we recycle and anecdotal evidence tells me that many, many other authorities do not recycle anything like the range we do---and given how angry I am about the whole Dean Pit debacle that is some praise.
However, to your specific problems---when the scheme started the black boxes existed and if we replaced them with wheelie bins the cost would have been huge---and that would have been a waste of the taxpayers' money. The lids may be fragile but mine have not broken (and I don't see any other broken ones when I walk down Enstone Road---nor debris either) so I dispute your claim that 'most of us have lost our lids'. If you (or a friend) went to the WODC shop in the centre of Witney you could have replacement lids without the boxes. You could also have nets (which wouldn't break) but I don't want those as then things really would get wet.
I never said that May Gurney was 'a wonderful employer' but when we had the last lengthy exchange on this topic I got information from WODC to the effect that the staff turnover was low and the vans were ergonomically designed for ease of use.
Whether being a refuse collector is a reasonable manual job or a exploitative form of 21st century slave labour is beyond me---the last manual jobs I had (apart from bringing up a family and running a house while teaching part-time and being a vicar's wife, was when I was an undergraduate---building roads (very small dirt ones) in Norway and the Alps in my vac. I would not want to go back to doing that (though the scenery was amazing) but then I am somewhat older than I was then (or than the refuse collectors are).
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