6:08pm Tuesday 25th September 2007
By Fran Bardsley
People in East Oxford are to be offered free blue bins to get people living in student and shared houses to recycle more.
At the moment, all households are given a free blue box - but for a full-sized wheelie bin, you have to pay £22. Oxford City Council's east area parliament has allocated £2,200, enough to buy 100 bins, to City Works to encourage people to recycle.
Sid Phelps, who represents St Mary's ward, which has a large number of houses of multiple occupation, said: "We all have our own experience of certain properties where recycling is haphazard, if done at all.
"The east area parliament is keen to enable those 'hard to reach' properties to contribute to the recycling revolution taking place in Oxford.
"City Works has good knowledge of such properties and this grant will enable them to target resources where they are most needed."
At present, slightly fewer than 100 properties in East Oxford have ordered blue bins. And there have been concerns that it might be necessary to reimburse people who had already paid for their bin.
The controversial fortnightly waste collection - homes having alternate weekly collections of different kinds of waste - has caused problems in East Oxford where there is a large number of student homes.
Households can order up to three blue boxes, which are used for recycling plastic bottles, tins and cans, cardboard and paper, free of charge. But Mr Phelps, who has a blue bin himself, said that for some households this wasn't enough.
He said: "Three boxes are more difficult to handle than one blue wheelie bin and we feel blue wheelie bins in some of these households would be very useful in helping them manage their waste better.
"Some of the houses of multiple occupation or student houses may be more transient than some of the population, so maybe recycling is not top of their agenda.
"As such, we think it might help if we actually put a few bins around to help the situation."
Erica Bingley, who shares a house in Southfield Road, off Cowley Road, with three other professionals, said she thought it was a good idea. She said: "We do try to do our best to recycle as much as we can. But with four of us all eating different things, we do get a lot of bottles and tins and that kind of thing.
"We always put the recycling boxes out - but sometimes it gets completely full and we either have to hang on to stuff for two weeks, which isn't very nice, or throw it into the normal bin instead."
To find out more about getting a free blue bin, if you live in East Oxford, call the city works department on 01865 249811.
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/trade_directory/