A Nottingham councillor says the authority needs to consider penalties for people who don't recycle properly as a consultation continues on a new waste collection strategy for the city. The recently unveiled proposal for Nottingham City Council's waste collection set out two options for recycling.
One idea would see paper and card would be collected separately from other recyclable materials, which would continue to be collected in a wheelie bin. The second option would see multiple recycling containers introduced, with separate containers provided to collect paper and card, plastics and cans, and glass.
Members of Nottingham City Council's overview and scrutiny committee discussed the strategy at a meeting on Wednesday (November 9). During the meeting, Councillor Jane Lakey, Labour Party councillor for Bulwell, said that penalties for people not recycling properly needed considering, no matter which recycling scheme was eventually chosen.
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Councillor Lakey said: "We're going to have to look at penalties for individual residents, not just for businesses. There are genuine mistakes, a greasy pizza box is a good example, which to be truthful I wasn't aware of until recently, but there has to be some form of compulsion.
"We have to think about recalcitrant residents who are refusing to recycle. If we're going to have a successful scheme then there has to be a penalty for people not using it."
Antony Greener, the head of district heating and waste strategy at Nottingham City Council, told councillors at Wednesday's meeting that an effective waste scheme had a "significant contribution" to make to the authority's target to become carbon neutral by 2028.
But he said that there needed to be more education work with the public and that more certainty was needed from Government on how much funding they would be providing for such work. Mr Greener also said that he understood the more efficient councils would receive more of this funding, saying: "The Government's thinking is that until you get to that level of efficiency, there are savings to be made internally."
A public consultation is underway on which recycling option would be most favoured by residents and on the broader waste strategy, with Mr Greener telling councillors that 1,500 responses had already been received. This consultation will be running until December 14.
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