Fighting for rubbish!

Watch out for an increase in fly-tipping now that we’ve lost our regular Saturday morning skip service in the Deepings.

Sadly, Lincolnshire County Council pulled the plug on the popular service at the end of December.

For years, three giant compactors turned up at the Rainbow Car Park every other Saturday morning. By noon, they were usually packed full with discarded items.

The cost was high – more than £1,000 every time the compactors turned up. I believe it was also inherently unsafe to have compactors operating on a busy supermarket car park.

And despite some people believing they were doing their bit for recycling, shamefully, every ounce collected was dumped straight into landfill.

But despite its shortcomings, the service was extremely popular and I've been working hard to try to get an alternative in place.

In December, I managed to persuade the County’s Portfolio Holder for Waste Services to meet Ian Prentice who runs Deepings Recycling Services.

Ian has offered to provide a rubbish skip at his site at a fraction of the cost of the compactors. As well as being safer, more would be recycled rather than landfilled.

It’s such a blindingly obvious solution, but not apparently, to the powers that be!

Thanks to Stamford Mercury for taking up my campaign in last week's paper – and making it the front page splash on their free paper, the Citizen, last week.

Sorry, can’t get the coverage on the internet, so no link...

As they say, watch this space.