Have your say on Council's waste strategy

This is a very straightforward survey and takes only a few minutes to fill out. Rubbish in landfill sites is smelly (accounts for up to 25% of all smell complaints to LAs) and dangerous (producing acid gases such as NO2, which causes asthma and susceptibility to infection, toxic organic micropollutants such as dioxin which are potentially cancer inducing, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which have been associated with changes in genes (mutagenicity) which may cause cancer). Other gases include hydrogen sulphide and methane. Landfill also produces particulates which can cause or exacerbate lung and heart disease, especially in children and the elderly. Metals such as arsenic, cadmium, and chromium may be emitted from landfills, microorganisms can be released into the air especially from biodegradable waste such as food, and substances such as aniline, arsenic and cyanide present in the leachate (run off) from landfill. So that's the reason CEC rightly
want to reduce our dependency on those black bins! So what's to do?
I'd say anything CEC can do to reduce the waste that goes to landfill is a good thing: get us home composting (easy, and produces lovely compost for your garden for free), anaerobic
biodigestion for food waste (have a look at Holmes Chapel's Cres Biogas website for information about what might be possible locally), encourage businesses to burden us with less waste (remember returnable bottles?), recycle wherever we can, get more street based recycling for cans etc on the go, and try going on the "rubbish diet" http://www.therubbishdiet.org.uk/ which is a great source of information, as is the Plastic Free July website. And get radical: take your own containers to the take away and always remember your shopping bags! It would be great if we could get across to CEC just how much we support efforts to reduce our collective dependency on those black bins.
Have a look at Jeremy Irons's film "Trashed" if you still need persuading: there's a trailer on the internet and it is a film definitely worth watching.

Your comment is laudable and most welcome Pippa and I am sure most of us do our best to follow the re-cycle path as best as our circumstances allow us to do. However you are naïve
to believe that this consultation is about anything other than saving money and cutting our waste services.
The timing is perfect it MUST be completed before 8th August, today is the 21st July, announced over the week-end and when most of us take our annual holidays during the next two weeks, therefore cutting down the percentage of people likely to participate.
Remember that the council have to by law consult with the taxpayer before making a change or alteration to a service.
Go online make your opinion count. Careful how you answer (ANSA). We do not want another reduced service by the back door.

No, Kathryn, not naive. I have considerable professional expertise in health and am very aware of the potential effects that the contents of our black bins may have on our collective wellbeing. The age at which people develop cancer is getting younger, and it is entirely plausible that this is in some way related to environmental toxins, to which our black bins contribute. If CEC decide to reduce the frequency with which our black bins are emptied, but add in a food waste collection which goes to a local biodigester, I for one will be in favour. There is no "away" in which to throw things. "Away" is in our land, our countryside, our water supply, our air, our childrens' bodies. Please watch Jeremy Irons in Trashed: you might learn something!

The effect on our health IS my prime concern. We are not all in a position to compost our left over waste. We do not all have gardens large enough some of us have no garden at all when living in flats/apartments. The collection of waste on a weekly basis was until 1974 a legal right. Councils have been required to empty bins since the Public Health Act of 1875, precisely because of the effect on human health of discarded food lying around our living areas. In the summer months the stench of rotting food and the accompanying flies,maggots, rats and mice is deplorable. Other councils still manage to maintain their waste re-cycle targets without going down the route of not emptying the bins for weeks on end. Evidence is emerging that bi-weekly collections merely have the effect of people travelling to the local tip themselves with their rubbish. Legislation will become necessary to prevent councils from using non collection to save money on residual waste fines of 10 million pounds per year from 2014 to 2020. I believe legislation is to be introduced if the Conservative Party are re-elected that councils will be required as a minimum to collect the waste on a weekly basis.

It seems to me that this "consultation" is not about the benefits of recycling and reusing, but about saving money. The agenda within it is manyfold. Firstly, they want you to say that it is beneficial to reduce the number of black bin collections. Secondly, they want to maintain the jobsworthy individuals who currently "educate" schoolchildren on this by visiting schools etc (despite the fact that the topic is already covered in Personal and Social Education), and thirdly they want to continue to have managers albeit in their "arms length company" (which we were not consulted on in advance) on big salaries.

It is clear that less has to be thrown away. What we are not seeing from our council is any initiatives to help individuals from doing this other than promoting the charity door to door collections for large household items. Yet, if you go to freegle there are numerous things on offer which others could use. Many people will not advertise free items on freegle because they do not want strangers turning up at their door so they bin them instead. The council could offer a service whereby free items that someone has said they wanted could be dropped off at local venues where people could collect from. Will the Council do this? Of course they won't because it would mean thinking outside the box. They also have to face up to the fact that the more that is reused the less we reach our recycling targets.

As to composting organic waste at home - great if you have a house with a large garden. What about the rows of terraced houses with no gardens or the blocks of flats? As someone who has tried a wormery - I wasn't quite ready for the volume of flies.

Sorry if I didn't make myself clear: I quite agree that leaving food waste in black bins for weeks at a time is extremely unhygienic which is why I would only favour a reduction in black bin collection if there was provision of a dedicated food waste collection that was taken to a local biodigester to be turned into heat and compost instead of rotting in landfill.
Of course we are all live different lives so while freegle, composting and wormeries may be great for some, they aren't for everyone; but it may be there are some people who would like to use these given a bit more given more information. The Waste and Recycling pages on the CEC website give details of the Cheshire Furniture Reuse Forum and other resources so there is quite a variety of ways that people can dispose of things they no longer need. It's great to know children are educated about waste reduction in school. It sounds as if we are all agreed that we should be producing less waste and disposing of what we do produce more thoughtfully, and inevitably there are is a variety of views as to how to achieve this. I'd like to see us waste less and put less in landfill and I agree that we probably need more CEC investment to achieve this rather than less: and agree with you that we all have a role to play. Our children and grandchildren won't thank us for a legacy of landfill!

"Our Waste service is now governed by the Council's wholly-owned company Ansa Environmental Services Limited in a bid to improve efficiency"

Ansa is an arms length company formed and owned by CEC. The company was formed by transferring existing council staff, mainly from the original dept. responsible for these matters (under TUPE regulations), into this organisation.

Why did CEC do this?

These so called 'Teckal’ companies have one key advantage, the controlling authority does not need to run a procurement procedure to give a contact to this provider', in other words the finance and risk taking oppurtunity is removed from the private sector.

So how do we know we are getting value for money - we don't.

The real kicker is that if this company goes belly up - we the tax payer will have to bail it out and the staff will simply transferred back into their old roles at the council.

This is a classic case of local authority's playing at being corporations, I.e land developers in Handforth East, Waste Experts (Lymm Green fiasco), Adventure Playground (Tatton Park), Business And Housing Devlopment (Alderley Park).

My question, if these projects and council companies don't work, unlike in a private company - who pays? (Guess who!).

The consultation seems to be yet another box-ticking exercise from CEC and, to be frank, none of us can really know with any degree of certainty what the correct answers are, for example:
1. Please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with the following objectives regarding service delivery:
Strongly agree Agree Neither agree nor disagree Disagree Strongly Disagree

Please select one option per row Cheshire East Council WILL:

a. Deliver a quality and value for money waste management service that achieves consistently high levels of customer satisfaction of 80% or more
b. Deliver services in a cost effective way through a wholly owned company
c. Investigate the opportunities for efficiencies through working with other waste collection and disposal authorities
If you have any comments to make regarding the above objectives please detail them in the box provided below:

How can we know that CEC WILL perform the above- we know that they SHOULD; most of the questions are in the same format. WILL, rather than SHOULD>

Interestingly, it is possible to complete the consultation more than once, even using the same postcode.

@Pete

It appears to me that more and more people are finally waking up to that fact so called democracy, at both local and government level, is a sham.

We have local Councillors that are invisible in these debates. I'm sure they do good work in an ad-hock manner, but they appear to be ineffectual in pursuing the needs of us, the electorate, at a strategic level.

As I've mentioned previously, Council now run themselves almost as corporations, with major decisions being made by the diktats of key bodies (or boards) within the Council. These people don't reflect the needs of the county as a whole, but their paymasters within Government.

The days of local councils just providing a simple service to the local community are gone, they play at being PLC's with initiative's, business plans, job creation etc. instead of doing what they are supposed to do.

One thing they do excel at though is Council Tax collection, try missing a month, and you'll be hit with a reminder sharpish, very quickly followed by court costs and bailiffs banging at your door demanding payment. But hey, they only blew a couple of million at Lymme Green - funny no bailiffs or court appearances there.

Gosh, Graham.You're almost pointing out that these people treat us as some sort of inferiors, that they know better than we do. Why on earth would they try to suppress the report into the Lyme Green - er, "fiasco" seems too tame a word: what about deception? - so that we couldn't see the incompetence involved? I wouldn't be surprised if they're keeping tabs on this so that the next time you apply to have a conservatory built, it'll "mysteriously" get turned down.

John, Its okay I'll do what they call in the building trade "a Lyme Green" and not bother with planning permission.