Chepstow Friends of the Earth has joined with Monmouth and Abergavenny & Crickhowell Friends of the Earth to oppose Monmouthshire County Council's plan to switch our award-winning Black Box recycling service to a co-mingled one. All the research has shown that source separated kerbside recycling services like Monmmouthshire Community Recycling's Black Box scheme are the best way to deal with our waste:

• Best for the environment because it preserves the quality and value of the materials collected by keeping them separate and allowing "closed loop" recycling
• Cheaper to run because the materials collected can be sold to reprocessors for a good price
• Better for our communities because it provides twice as many - and higher skilled - local jobs.

Yet MCC has voted to extend the co-mingled purple sack collection system used in Usk, Govilon and Gilwern to the rest of the county. Collecting all the recycling in plastic sacks which are picked up by a compactor wagon and then mechanically sorted at a Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) will be a retrograde step:

• Cross contamination of the recycling means much of it is "down-cycled" to an inferior product (eg. glass to aggregate substitute instead of new bottles and jars)
• The service is more expensive to run because the compactor wagons used are more expensive and the MRF charges a gate fee in the region of £50/tonne
• Local collecting/sorting jobs are replaced by less efficient, mechanical sorting at the MRF.

TAKE ACTION!

Friends of the Earth is calling for MCC to reverse their decision and extend kerbside sorted recycling across the whole county.

Monmouthshire residents are urged to raise this issue with their local county councillor. A petition circulated in August and September collected nearly 2000 signatures and was presented to MCC on the 8th of October.