10th June 2008
Covert: Sussex Council has been secretly rummaging through people's rubbish to see how much food they are throwing away
Householders are having their rubbish secretly sifted and weighed to see how much food they are throwing away, it has emerged.
Wheelie-bins are being taken from residents without their knowledge, and spot checked to see how many scraps of food are in them and how much they weigh.
No permission is sought for the 'sampling' exercise and the householder is simply presented with a new bin.
Council taxpayers in Sussex have reacted furiously to the latest example of 'bin bureaucracy' and said officials had no right to snoop on the contents of their refuse.
Officials at Tory-run Mid-Sussex District Council attempted to reassure locals by telling them it is a 'fact-finding' exercise to gauge how much food is being dumped.
But residents branded the survey - which cost £1,700 - an invasion of privacy and fear it is the first step towards charging residents who fail to meet Government recycling targets.
Mother-of-three Michelle Gregory, 46, of Haywards Heath, received a letter sent to her by the council explaining they were looking through her waste the day after her regular rubbish collection.
She said: 'It just seems to be the way the world is going with CCTV cameras, ID cards and fingerprinting at schools.
'We just seem to be paying an awful lot of council tax for not a lot. The council should have informed people properly and clearly.
'Hopefully people are taking more care in throwing away important paperwork because there are conmen who could pick up on the right details.
'As a victim of a conman myself it just makes me cautious in everything that I do.'
Mid-Sussex Lid Dem opposition leader Cllr Brian Hall said: 'The sampling of residents' waste is a gross invasion of privacy. I was astonished when I found out it was going on.
'It's a thoroughly intrusive step. What people put in their bins is private, it's not for other people to go rummaging through. The fundamental issue here is security.
'Anyone who puts personal data in their bin will be at risk. Someone's private life could become a subject for gossip and speculation.'
Council bosses want to know what residents are throwing away and whether patterns have changed since weekly collections were introduced last summer.
The survey of 30 households is being carried out by the council and a team of students from the University of Brighton's Waste and Energy Research Group.
A council spokesman said: 'We are doing this as part of a campaign to reduce food waste. It's purely a fact-finding exercise.
'We can re-assure people that the purpose is to assess what the food waste is. Nobody is going through people's things. It's purely to assess how much food waste there is.'
Last year a survey revealed that taxpayers are footing a rising bill for Town Hall "rubbish police" as councils wage war on homeowners who fail to meet strict refuse laws.
The survey carried out under the Freedom of Information Act showed that local authorities across the country have seen increases of as much as 100 per cent in the cost of tackling 'enviro-crime'.
On Saturday the Mail reported how jobsworth binmen told householders that if they could not pull a wheelie bin using just two fingers it would not be emptied as it was too heavy.
Katie Shergold in the historic market town of Warminster, Wiltshire was astounded when refuse collectors stuck a 'too heavy to move' sticker on her bin of grass cuttings - even though the petite 26-year-old had managed to wheel the bin to the front of her house without any problems.
Last month, war veteran Lenny Woodward, 95, was told that binmen would no longer collect his rubbish because he had put a ketchup bottle in the wrong bin.
And in April bus driver Gareth Corkhill, 26, from Whitehaven in Cumbria, was fined £210 and given a criminal record because his wheelie bin lid was 'too full' as it was open by a few inches.
No comments:
Post a Comment