A massive purple robot has been unleashed on a poorly-performing London borough to kick start recycling
by Michael Smith
The 6m giant, Mr Recycle More, has been built from wheelie bins by Emergency Exit Arts and will tour Tower Hamlets, taking his waste management message to the London borough's schools, community centres and estates, according to information from the Borough.
Historically, Tower Hamlets has had some of the worst recycling rates in the country but in recent years has begun making significant improvements.
Knowing the borough, however, this is hardly surprising. Aside from the fact that the people, per se, may be disinterested in doing the recycling thing, often for being too lazy and also for being of a culture that may not like handling waste materials, the borough itself never has been much for providing any facilities. This may be different since my last proper visit to that borough but, for some reason, I doubt it.
One strand of the borough's strategy has been to try to engage the community and the unveiling of the robot in Spitalfields Market recently is part of that plan.
While the borough may have a strategy, according to its spokesperson, of engaging the community – which one of the communities in that borough precisely, as there is hardly a cohesive community in that borough – I am sure with many people in that borough, especially, in particular areas, that will very much fall on deaf ears.
Alongside the towering robot, the council's awareness-raising campaign will see hundreds of posters on bill boards and buses starring local people who recycle.
Fiona Heyland, Tower Hamlets' head of recycling, told the media that the borough was keen to improve its recycling rates.
"Over the last two years the council has done an awful lot of work to help educate people about recycling and give them access to services to make it easier for them to recycle," she said.
"The launch today is about bringing recycling back to the community [so people can] feel things are being done for them and with them rather than to them."
The unveiling of the robot follows the introduction of new services in the borough - green and food waste recycling as well as an army of litter pickers who will sort recyclable litter at the point they collect it for the first time.
The borough also recently launched Whitechapel as the first market in the country to recycle 100 per cent of the waste it generates.
The problem that still is not being addressed is to actually give people a real incentive to recycling, in the same way as it being done in, for instance, the USA and Norway, by way of reverse vending machines and other financial payback schemes.
If, instead of spending all that money on gimmicks and posters and roadshows, that money would be used as a beginning to get a monetary reward scheme going for people bringing in recyclables, I am sure, things would turn around rather quickly.
Then again the councils have absolutely no intention, in the UK, to pay people to recycle. They rather threaten to fine them. Recyclables, we must not forget, are being sold by the councils to industry, hence they do not want to even pay a penny or two per, say, aluminium can to people bringing them in. It would cut their profit margin.
The majority of people need incentives to really get the message of recycling, and once they can see that they get a few bob for their efforts they would definitely do it. It can be guaranteed, near enough, that we would end up with the same situation as in the USA where children and adults alike will walk the highways and byways and pick up all discarded tinnies and bring them to the recycling centers for a financial return.
As the manager of a recycling center in the USA told us; there, in his center, no one leaves with less than $100 in their pockets of an evening. That is a good income for a homeless family, for instance.
But, no doubt, the reply from government, whether local of central, in Britain to this would be that this may be fine and good in the USA and other countries, including some European ones, but it would never ever work in Britain, as Britain is different. This is the usual excuse that the UK governments tend to give when it comes to any such things.
While financial incentives as to recyclables could, I am well aware, cause people to steal things such as copper pipes and wires and such, it still should be something that should be attempted. The reverse vending machines and such likes, especially, for the likes of tinnies, plastic bottles and such. Glass bottles (and jars), on the other hand, should never end up in the recycling bin until such a moment that they are, in fact, broken and can not be used again for what they were intended for in the beginning.
For both glass bottles and glass jars a deposit scheme should be reintroduced, whether from the manufacturers as a scheme of their own or by “order” of government is irrelevant here. Those bottles and jars that people still leave in the countryside or litter bins will, as they used to, find their way back to the places that will pay the refund simply by children picking them up and returning them for pocket money as it used to be in days gone by.
© M Smith (Veshengro), October 2008
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Recycling robot to drive message home in Tower Hamlets
