I think rewards are a great idea - so long as the way it all works doesn't end up costing more to the taxpayer than it saves! Maybe the recycling crew keeping a simple log of households that recycle loads and have hardly and domestic / landfill waste and reward once a year?

I agree as I have a next door neighbour who does'nt even bother with the green bin. So as I put my small brown bin out once every 2 weeks he needs to put out his brown bin every week. He also does not compost but has a garden.

LBoS should insist those who can compost do and those caught not recycling being fined as this is costing us all more in the long run and is filling up landfill space.

Home composting is the best way of getting rid of garden waste, veggie peelings, tea bags and shredded confidential papers. It is environmentally friendly and cheap.

We support waste reduction through policies and schemes such as:
• No collection of side waste (rubbish that doesn't fit in the bin)
• Only giving households with less than five people one small brown bin
• Having a "Real nappy" cash back scheme
 
What other policies/ schemes do you think we need to encourage more people to reduce the amount of rubbish they produce?

I whole heartedly support this idea. However, it would require improved access to recycling bins (something that many flats within the borough do not have). Could work be done with managing agents and landlords to provide green bins?

I don't really care about being rewarded for recycling, i've done it my whole life and i don't think the council would come up with a good and appropriate reward. i'd be happy to penalise those that don't recycle though!

Flats recycling bins
It can be difficult to find space and sometimes the approval (by managing agents/ residents associations) for recycling bins at flats across the borough. 93% of our flats do have some sort of recycling collection. We work with architects of new builds to ensure that they plan enough space for both rubbish and recycling containers.

If your flat does not have any recycling please visit our website and get in get in touch.

Rewards
What sort of reward would motivate you to recycle? Vouchers for the leisure centres/ local businesses? Donation to charity?
What do you think is an appropriate award?

Penalties
How would you penalise people that don’t recycle?

Rewards: leisure centre vouchers would definitely not motivate me, not in sutton anyway. Call me pesimistic but I don't think charity donations would be too successful. Shopping vouchers would be nice, especially if it was a mixture of supermarkets (to appeal to the masses) and local businesses (to raise awareness and support).

Penalties
- smaller brown bin
- community service
- a landfill tax passed on to households (based upon council tax band perhaps)
- or maybe something like the police do with speeders; pay a fine or watch a video about speeding. Perhaps you could target non-recyclers and force education upon them!

What are those disabled residents to do who rely on the assisted waste collection? The last thing they need is more pressure to do more tasks. They already pay the council handsomely do deal with their rubbish. You don't keep a dog and bark yourself anyway. The last thing we need to be paying for is more bin snoopers to make our lives a misery.

I think people who recycle will do so anyway, so rewarding behaviour that is already going on, while nice to have, might not achieve much. In general I think it's better to reward than punish but maybe here we need both.

Equally is one of our core values. If rewards or fines were introduced we would make sure that people that receive assisted collections were not treated unfairly.

Bubbleburster - Please do not worry that you would be expected to do something you cannot physically do.

There are already some great ideas for both rewards and penalties in this discussion. Is there anything that has not been mentioned so far?

Household waste volume depends on the number of people in a particular household. Therefore it is the ratio of recycled to landfill waste that would need to be measured. This is a huge exercise and I would have thought might be costly and bureacratic although necessary if you are to get a rewards/penalties system right.
In my view behavioural change is best achieved by making the cultural change so that everyone understands that a failure to recycle represents antisocial behaviour. This sounds limp but an easy win might be for the binmen to note which households persistently recycle very low volumes and target them directly with recycling information at the time of the waste collection, pointing out that they are out of line with the rest of the community.
In the long run, the transparency model - simply publishing recycling:brown waste ratios per household might also produce sufficient peer pressure to bring about the necessary behavioural changes but you will need data if it is to be credible.

Folk need to be encouraged to recycle not threatened.
If resildents were fined for not recycling then there would need to be some form of policing which would surely reduce the cost effectiveness.

Why do you need to reward people to recycle, with all the cutbacks and budget reductions I think this is another example of wasting public money.
 Why dont you chip the bins you will be able to see what road/street recycles the most and maybe award a certificate and trophy, this might fit in with the Big Society and its aims of everybody helping each other in their community.

Information we have looked at from other councils that have run reward schemes shows that most people only change their behaviour if they feel that they will receive a reward. This means that community rewards, like donating money to a local charity or creating a garden in a block of flats do not seem to work in terms of encouraging people to recycle more.

Is there something that we could give to your local community that would really encourage you to recycle everything you possibly could?

the no side waste policy is extremely unfair as some houses have only 1 small brown bin and others two or even three .one house (please note this is one house not flats) local to me has FOUR LARGE brown bins ,so how can one bag beside a small bin be justifiable to not collect?

We introduced the "no side waste" policy to encourage people to recycle more and throw away less. rpace - if you would like some tips on how to reduce your waste please send an email to wastemanagement@sutton.gov.uk.

No household should have more than one bin. Families of 5 or more can have a larger bin and a house converted into a small number of flats is likely to have one bin per flat. However, we are aware some households do have more than one bin - about 5%.

Do you think that we should take bins away from those that have more than one? Would this be fairer?

Yes!

I think to reduce the amount of stuff in the brown bin you need to introduce a food recycling scheme. Also, when I lived in Cardiff we were able to put yoghurt pots and margarine tubs in the recycling, as well as tin foil, which we can't here.
So increase the amount of stuff we CAN recycle, before targetting people

Fines are a wonderfull idea. Of course people should be fined for putting rubbish in their bins, and then you'll have even more money to spend on speed humps. It has the thumbs up from me as eventually there will be so many speed humps the roads will be smooth again. I can't wait and neither can my car's suspension.

Most plastics are now marked with the recycling sybol and usually a number - any recycling centre will take number 1 and few will take the higher numbers (say over 5). What is Sutton's limit on this. It should be publicised.
We wash all our plastic food pots or tins at the end of washing up, rinse them and they go into the green bin (via the very useful ex-glass collection blue bin which acts as our holding area for recyclables). If something that we have put in the blue bin does not fit Sutton's scheme then th esorting will filter it out and it won't have contaminated the rest of the recyclables. So you can try to recycle your margarine container if you have washed it.
I totally agree that any household of less than two people should NOT have a large brown bin. It merely encourages landfill which is undesirable and expensive.

How very green washing your rubbish. What everyone seems to have lost sight of is we pay the Council to collect the waste, they are not doing us a favour, they have been paid to do it. If anyone should be fined it’s the council if they the fail to provide the service they have been paid to do. If they want us to sort our rubbish they should reduce the Council tax to reflect that, and even then it should be at our discretion not theirs. As for washing rubbish I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous.

Plastic types 1 and 2 can be recycled in Sutton. Over 90% of plastic bottles are made of these plastic types.

Of the annual Band D Council Tax payment, £1.50 per week is currently spent on your rubbish and recycling service.

Recycling helps us to keep the costs down since it is cheaper than sending waste to a landfill site.