Haringey Labour has terminated the Council’s contract with the company Recycling Works without debate, following a meeting of the Council’s Executive. Lib Dem councillors have criticised the decision, and fear that it may be a sign that Labour are moving away from hand-sorted recycling in preference of ‘co-mingled’ collections, which are far less environmentally friendly.

Recycling Works provide a hand-sorted recycling service, which allows glass to be reused to create new glass items. Haringey Council may now rely more heavily on a so-called ‘co-mingled’ glass recycling service, where recyclable waste is mixed at the point of collection. Glass collected in this way is suitable only for re-use as road aggregate.

Lib Dems fear that Labour are focussing too heavily on overall targets for bulk waste collection, at the expense of the environment. Incredibly, in the report presented to the Executive, there was no mention in the written reports of the environmental impacts of the various options for running the services.

Councillor Martin Newton, Lib Dem joint spokesperson Environment, comments:

“Recycling Works is an innovative Company that is committed to best practice over recycling and has been publicly congratulated for helping to boost Haringey’s participation rates in recycling. They employ local people with an emphasis for getting people off the unemployment register. They have been awarded grants to pilot door-to-door collections for estates in Tottenham. They have also been in talks about collecting recycling from Businesses, including collecting cooking oil to produce ‘Green’ Diesel. This company appears to be a credit to the borough and further ways should be sought to achieve a satisfactory negotiation with them.”

Councillor Bob Hare, Lib Dem joint spokesperson for the Environment adds:

“If the commitment of this Council is to now move further away from hand-sorted recycling and to increase the co-mingled collections, this will have a detrimental impact – it is far more environmentally friendly and energy efficient to re-use glass to create new glass items, rather than using it for road aggregate, which is the end result of co-mingled collections. Labour need to look very carefully at the detail rather than blindly chasing targets without considering the environmental impact. We want recycling to be expanded, but not at the expense of environmental efficiency.”