Dear Sir or Madam

As a householder within the Caerphilly County Borough Council Area, I am writing to STRONGLY OBJECT to ANY FORCED changes to the recycling and rubbish collection of Caerphilly county Borough Council by the Welsh Assembly Government that is detrimental to the council and people of the borough as a result of the continued interference and the direct or indirect 'threats' of European Parliament.

Having used the Caerphilly council doorstep recycling almost from its inception where you had to separate each different material into plastic bags and finding it such a bind that my wife and I almost stopped using it.

Therefore It was a relief when they change to the a single, co-mingled brown bin collection which made things far simpler for us to recycle - and in fact, we started to recycle far more items which continues to this day as the brown bin has a lid to protect the contents, is of a far larger capacity and fitted with wheels for easier transport than the green recycling box.

The added advantage of this system is that:

  1.. We can recycle far more usable materials.

  2.. It makes it easier for the elderly (such as my wife and self) to transport the recycling from the rear of the property to the collection point.

  3.. It gives far more protection to the enclosed dry materials thus reducing water and other forms of contamination.

  4.. It makes it far easier and uses less manpower to collect the recycling - thus going some way to reducing the councils bills.

  5.. As this dry recycling is now processed and sorted at a single site by use of machinery and competent and experienced staff, then that must increase the efficiency of the operation by using less staff, the amount of useable and re-saleable materials and more importantly reducing manpower, fuel and atmospheric contamination from idling vehicle engines when the materials are resorted at the kerbside

  6.. It encourages people to throw far less away as pure rubbish - thus reducing the amount of landfill - as already proven in the statistics of collections by CCBC.

In view of this, I believe that if the Welsh Assembly forces Caerphilly to abandon their present and efficient collection method and return to multiple self-sorted recycling collection boxes then this would be a retrograde and very costly step for the council - AND would greatly annoy the majority of the people of Caerphilly County Borough who have helped their council to achieve the level of recycling it has and may well have the opposite effect - and that will certainly apply to wife and myself.

As a last few words.

In my opinion, the Welsh Assembly should in fact be doing the opposite by encouraging those many councils in Wales using the doorstep recycling separation to adopt the methods used by CCBC (and the few other enlightened councils using the same method) rather than the umpteen separate container and bag systems that they use to their detriment.

And as for using plastic bags for rubbish collection, how does that reconcile itself where the Welsh Assembly now force the population of Wales to pay a 5 pence charge for almost all the various paper and plastic single-use bags supplied by retailers etc - yet allow councils to use large plastic bags for rubbish collection and 40,000 of those a week are use by Torfaen council alone I believe?

Yours faithfully,

Brian Gray