I have previously highlighted problems with the recycling centre at Roseangle overflowing (particularly the plastics bins) and constituents again highlighted this over the past couple of days, as reported in last night's Evening Telegraph.
The centre was serviced and tidied at my request yesterday so is now looking a lot better:
However, the substantive issue is that the facility either requires more bins or more regular servicing. The Environment Department's Head of Policy and Performance responded to me as follows yesterday on these points as follows:
"With regard to the above issue, the ongoing concern seems to be the amount of plastics waste (bulky, and any bins for this commodity tend to fill a lot more quickly than other commodities). Ideally we would like to reconfigure the amount of bins on the site - but owing to the space constraints there, this could mean removing a bin for another commodity, which would prove problematic in other ways.
Additionally, our collection framework is set up in such a way that carrying out another collection here would be challenging operationally, so we are therefore actively looking into reconfiguring the site to have smaller bins for some of the other commodities, thus allowing more room for additional plastic bin(s). As soon as this is undertaken, a member of the team will advise you."
In response I made the point that expanding the facility to the immediate west may prove viable and had this follow-up helpful reply:
"We intend to try to make improvements to the configuration to better accommodate the plastics volume as our first change - if we could expand the site as you suggest, it would certainly be of value. We will therefore investigate this aspect as well.
Just for noting, the majority of our resources this week are devoted to the container delivery and associated programmes, so it may be a week or so before we can make any potential changes at this site."