Brit council spends £100k instructing residents how to sort waste

London, Dec 6 (ANI): A city council in Britain is spending 100,000 pounds on a publicity campaign for a food recycling scheme that will instruct women on how to sort waste.

The campaign, which was unveiled as part of a city-wide slop bucket scheme in Wolverhampton that will cost more than 1 million pounds, features junk mail, billboards and leaflets written in nine different languages.

But the campaign has been condemned as "complicated and expensive" with local residents saying they do not have the time to sort their food waste into five different bins.

The junk mail and leaflets will be delivered to homes across the West Midlands city with the scheme expected to start next year.

Cabinet Member for Environment, Cllr Barry Findlay, said more residents were likely to recycle their food once they were better informed about the benefits.

"When it decomposes in landfill, food waste produces methane gas which contributes to climate change," the Daily Mail quoted him as explaining.

"Recycled food waste on the other hand can be processed into a soil conditioner in agriculture. It also reduces the amount of waste that has to be incinerated which in turn helps to cut down the cost of waste disposal.

"Wolverhampton residents have shown a real enthusiasm for recycling other kinds of waste so I'm confident that once people have the facts about food caddies, they'll make good use of them for their food waste," he stated.

But the plan to roll out the recycling bins and spend thousands on promoting them has been criticised by council opposition and consumer representatives.

"We have always maintained that there should have been a pilot scheme before substantial sums of money were spent," Opposition Labour leader Councillor Roger Lawrence said.

"It's no wonder that they have to spend so much on a communications strategy, particularly given that this is being rolled out without establishing the problems that some households will have with limited space or other issues," he stated.

And Emma Boon, from the Taxpayer's Alliance, has said that expecting taxpayers to separate their waste into five different bins is unlikely to endear them to the ideal of recycling, it's more likely to create resentment.

"Moreover this is an expensive project; with huge pressures on the public finances, councils need to seriously curb spending on publicity," she added.

About 98,000 homes will be asked to use a new bin in their kitchen and another one outside once the scheme starts on January 17, and frustrated restaurants will have to sort their waste into five different bins. (ANI)