For over a year we have been trying as best we can to manage skip availability. Unfortunately, ad-hoc closures of the recycling yard, when skips were full, was starting to become the norm. Nobody could have failed to notice the ever-growing white-goods pile too.
We operate the Urgha site as a satellite of Comhairle nan Eilean Siar's (CnES) main domestic waste site at Bennadrove, Stornoway. CnES provide us with the skips and collect the waste for weighing and processing or onward shipment. Successive years of council budget cuts have stalled the replacement of trucks, skips and staff. On top of that, there have been fires at one of the mainland processing plants for waste electricals (W.E.E.E), preventing waste being sent away.
Things are on the turn though. Two new hooklift trucks came into service last year, replacing 9 year old, unreliable predecessors. New staff have been recruited as well. The white goods pile is almost no more!
Last week we had a visit from Scottish Environment Protection Agency (S.E.P.A) representatives. We pay each year for a licence from them to operate the site and have to adhere to an agreed Operational Plan. This limits the types of waste we can accept and the volumes handled. We've just invested in a new bunded store for hazardous liquids, so that addressed their last concern. This time though the focus was on Waste Upholstered Domestic Seating (W.U.D.S) - sofa and chairs.
Last year, new legislation came into force preventing the landfill of materials that contained Persistent Organic Pollutants (P.O.P.S). Fire-retardant chemicals used on upholstery contained POPs in the past. All upholstery now has to be segregated from other waste and separately sent away for incineration on the mainland.
Unfortunately for CnES, with the new responsibilities for dealing with POPs came no new funding. So no money for transporting off-island and no money for dedicated storage containers. Our stop-gap has been to collect items and store on the Old Gun Club. This creates the problem of the items getting wet (and therefore heavier) -and its on land outside our licenced site. We have removed one skip-full, but there are another three to go.
Just when things were improving though, we took a call to say that the Bethesda charity was stopping its clothes recycling collection. It is reported that the market for second had textiles in Africa has shrunk with the import of new Chinese goods. So the waste no longer has enough financial value to warrant collecting it up. We are working with CnES to find a way of continuing to segregate the waste and prevent it ending up in landfill.
Who would have thought so much was involved in domestic waste and recycling?
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