Recycling plastics at Tesco Riverside and Neighbourhood Recycling Points

At the request of residents, I recently asked the City Council about the possibility of providing plastics recycling facilities at Tesco Riverside.   Many local residents have yet to be provided with the "green recycling boxes" that cater for plastics, bottles, etc and the provision of plastics recycling facilities at Tesco Riverside would be of benefit.

The City Council has responded as follows :

"I'm afraid we are currently unable to provide plastics recycling bins at Tesco Riverside. As I thought, this had been considered when the current bins were originally installed but could not be implemented due to issues with both space at the site and operational capacity. As plastics do not compact under their own weight as other wastes do, these bins tend to fill up much more quickly than others. In order to cope with anticipated usage therefore, a greater number of bins on a more frequent collection schedule is required - a provision we unfortunately do not currently have the operational capacity to fulfill.

While this is the situation at the moment, I must stress that we do intend to provide plastics recycling facilities at this very popular site at some point in the future, although I'm afraid I cannot provide any timescales for this at present. In anticipation of the forthcoming legislative requirements for waste & recycling, we've had to change our policy on recycling provision & look at the implementation of full city-wide services rather than adding to individual sites in isolation. We therefore require further efficiencies throughout our service in order to allow for any such future rollout plans."

I do hope it will be possible to look at this again in the near future, particularly as the recycling facilities at Tesco are well-used.    The City Council has a fair bit to go in terms of rolling out plastics recycling to many homes in Dundee.    I also asked - again following residents' requests - about the possibility of having a plastics recycling facility at Neighbourhood Recycling Points (like this one at Lochee Road/Mitchell Street) and have received the following reply from Dundee City Council :

"At the moment we don't have any provision for plastics at our NRPs. The size of the containers combined with the bulkiness of the plastics would necessitate more frequent uplifts than we currently have the operational capacity for. Greater plastics provision at bring sites is something we're keen to investigate further in future but any current NRP sites would provide bins for recycling three colours of glass and paper & cardboard only."