Council to issue new bins for glass recycling

SOUTH Lanarkshire Council are to introduce an extra wheelie bin in an effort to improve the area’s recycling rate.

As part of a pilot scheme, 52,000 households were given the opportunity to recycle mixed glass using a re-usable canvas sack which is currently collected from the kerbside on a fortnightly basis.

However, according to the council, glass recycling has proved to be such a success with residents that a small 140-litre burgundy-coloured wheelie bin, which will hold more and be emptied from the kerbside every four weeks, is to be provided where suitable.

This will hold a lot more glass than the existing sack and is regarded as a safer method of collection.

Distribution of the burgundy bins, which will replace the current re-usable canvas sack supplied during the pilot scheme, is set to begin on March 16.

It is expected that the distribution operation will be completed within about eight weeks.

Meanwhile, residents in the new housing developments and in rural areas throughout South Lanarkshire will also be receiving their blue recycling bins during the week commencing March 16, and suitable locations are currently being looked at for the installation of communal recycling facilities close to blocks of flats so that flat-dwellers can contribute to domestic recycling too.

People who live in properties such as terraced houses and tenements where neither blue wheeled bins nor communal recycling facilities are available will, early in the new financial year, receive transparent refuse sacks so that they can recycle their domestic waste.

Separate information and a calendar of collection dates will be distributed to householders with the new glass collection bins and blue recycling bins.

Residents in South Lanarkshire have recycled over 75,000 tonnes of waste in the past year, which is said to give it a recycling rate of 37 per cent, one of the highest in the country. However, there have been claims that certain materials collected for recycling end up in the local authority’s landfill sites.