Lets recycle!

So third blog and it just keeps getting easier and easier (no not really!) this blog will be on waste recycling in Northamptonshire and will focus the seven districts that make up Northamptonshire. These are South Northamptonshire council, Northampton itself, Daventry district council in the West, Kettering Borough council (also in the west), Corby borough council (in the North), East Northamptonshire council and the Borough council of Wellingborough (in the South-East). These Seven make up the political makeup of Northamptonshire but each one is very different in its characteristics as there are some that are rural and there are some that are very urban. These differences will make a difference in the manner that they collect and recycle their waste as different areas will have different ways of carrying out their waste recycling policies. The East Northamptonshire council has the lowest waste collection of the lot of them (26.8% compared to 39.2 average over the whole area of Northamptonshire). This could be due to the very rural nature of the area which borders East Cambridgeshire which is a very rural and agricultural area which may explain why there is not as much recycling. Many of these areas like the little villages are very hard to accesses from the major population centres and this means that there is little waste collection and so their percentages are lower. There is also the issue of the council actually wanting to recycle the waste as there is a charge for picking up recyclables which is in place nowhere else in the country and is a very rare thing to do in the whole of the country and is detrimental to the whole system of recycling. There are could also be other things such as people just couldn’t be bothered to recycle but we can’t tell that from the charts given and people would be unlikely to admit to it anyway so it is nearly an impossible thing to try and survey. So it seems after all this then that this business of recycling is a case of it takes two to tango as it is one thing to have a lot of people wanting to recycle but you need a reciprocal council to take up the scheme and actually want to do help the people in their district to recycle. This works in opposite as well because if you have a council that actively wants to recycle but doesn’t have the popular support they have to do a lot to make people want to recycle and this is the crux of the matter. This is an issue that will always be as difficult one as there will be many problems to overcome. There will always be people who don’t want to recycle and there will always be people over do a lot of recycling and believe that their respective council are not doing enough to help them ‘save the planet’. Trying to find a balance will always been a very difficult and thorny issue and it one that all councils will face but the outcome will be the decision of a lot of different people.