UK's worst recycle council does it again—this time with compost

25 November 2008

Doing his bit... Johnson recycling his garden waste

Mike Brooke

TOWN Hall bosses in London’s East End have hit rock bottom on a second front in the Great Recycling war.

Tower Hamlets is now officially London’s worst borough for recycling garden waste—in addition to household waste.

It follows Government statistics earlier this month putting it at the bottom of the pile for local authority household recycling anywhere in the country—for the second year running.

Now the poor performance has spread to the garden with more Government figures out this week showing Tower Hamlets only managed less than one per cent waste composting—or 0.15 per cent to be precise, according to the Environment Department in Whitehall.

“This shows an opening gulf between the best and worst London boroughs,” said London Assembly’s Darren Johnson.

“All the evidence shows that Londoners want to recycle more—but they’re being let down by Tower Hamlets which is failing to run doorstep collection services for all residents.”

The embarrassing statistics come a week after Tower Hamlets launched a recycling drive with a giant robot called ‘Mr Recycle More’ made of 33 regurgitated purple bins.

The authority has managed to double its household recycling to 13 per cent—but is still at the bottom of the national local authority league table for the second year running.

The council’s Labour Cabinet member for the Environment, Abdal Ullah, defended the record in a letter to the East London Advertiser claiming the Government figures were “out of date.”

But just as the Town Hall thought it was out of the woods, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs put out the latest compost recycle figures, dumping Tower Hamlets right down at the bottom of all 33 London boroughs with its poor 0.15 per cent performance.

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Top of the heap:

Harrow 18.20

Bexley 17.62

Hillingdon 12.58

Barnet 12.42

Richmond 11.54

Enfield 10.11

Waltham Forest 10.05

Sutton 9.86

Brent 8.90

Ealing 7.86

Havering 7.82

Bromley 6.84

Kingston 6.66

Haringey 6.57

Hackney 6.53

Croydon 6.29

Barking & Dagenham 5.58

Islington 5.41

Redbridge 5.00

Greenwich 4.78

Hounslow 4.26

Southwark 4.02

Merton 3.75

Camden 3.23

Lambeth 2.58

Newham 2.06

Hammersmith & Fulham 1.50

Bottom of the pile: less than 1 per cent:

Kensington & Chelsea 0.90

Westminster 0.84

Lewisham 0.58

City 0.38

Wandsworth 0.29

Tower Hamlets 0.15