Blue Bins are Coming to Wigan Borough
When it comes to your concerns about recycling paper, we’re listening.
Paper is a precious commodity and there’s a lot of good work being done in this area but each year the UK still puts more than five million tonnes of the stuff in landfill sites. So there’s more work to be done. In Wigan we provide a white sack for your waste paper recycling but you’re telling us we may need to do a bit more.
Wet and windy weather can cause problems when you’re leaving your paper outside in a bag. And you’ve also told us that you could recycle more if you had something bigger to put all that paper in. So we’ve ‘been thinking about it and, while we’re still quite a long way off with this one, we may have hit on a solution.
In fact in time we could be waving goodbye to the white sack altogether and saying hello to a new blue bin. The bin would hold twice as much as the sack and you could put loads more stuff in it – from paper and cardboard.
We’re thinking that a collection every four weeks would be about right and this way you wouldn’t have to worry about what kind of cardboard you can put in your green bin…you’d just put it into the blue! As we’ve said, we’re at the very earliest stages of this plan but ideally we’d like to give everyone a blue bin by early 2012.
As with any good plan we’d need to test it our first so we’re going to be starting trials of the new blue bin scheme next summer (2010).
We’ll be giving residents in certain areas a blue bin which will be the same size as their other bins. Although we’re big believers in choice so we are also planning to offer a half-size blue bin or you could even continue with your white sack if it works for you.
The really important thing is that you carry on recycling and when it comes to paper you can do more than ever now. We can now deal with newspapers, magazines, directories, white envelopes and glitter-free greetings cards.
Your views are really important to us so if you have any comments to make about these changes please let us know. You can e-mail us at: bluebincomments@wigan.gov.uk
