There was a story in the Yorkshire Evening Post this week about how Leeds City Council hired a firm, Jacobs UK and Entec, to conduct a survey. Not just any survey but a ''top secret study that began in June 2005 that saw contractors rifling through the black and green bins of hundreds of homes on SIX occasions to find out how much and what sort of waste [residents] threw away.''
Now those opposed, like the current coalition government, say they do not approve because ''it is engaging in activity which could reasonably be understood as encroaching on individual privacies and liberties.'' The rebuttal from the council is that they couldn't tell the public because ''it could have led to changes in recycling behaviour.''
Let's take a hypothetical situation: Suppose Leeds City Council had warned the residents of Leeds that a survey would be conducted for the next five years to study their waste and recycling behaviour. Do you think residents would go out of their way to ensure no incriminating evidence was in the bins on the off chance that their bins were checked? I think to give more credit to the local community, most people don't care what they put in their bins so long as the waste is out of the house. Most people understand what is considered the appropriate items to place in the respective bins. Plastic bottles, tin cans, etc = recycling; cardboard boxes, food waste, etc=waste bin. It isn't a difficult concept to grasp but apparently, it requires a five-year study to prove that.
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