We're told that local authorities are taking recycling of waste Very Seriously in the light of government targets, landfill taxes and the like. Barely a week passes without someone hectoring the general public about it. I'm all in favour: all my organic waste gets composted and put into the garden and I lug carrier bags full of bottles and cans a mile and a half to the local recycling centre because the council's recyclable waste collection service is rather a lot less than perfect. Even so, I do get browned off with the strident stuff coming from local government, especially knowing what really goes on backstage...
If you think about it public libraries do generate a huge amount of waste paper. As well as the usual detritus you'd expect from any local government department there are old newspapers and magazines, telephone and trade directories, and of course the books that don't get shifted in our interminable booksales. What do we do with them? We send caretakers down to the local supermarket to dump the waste paper and newspapers in the recycling bins there and hope that nobody sees them do it because we'd then be fined for dumping trade waste. We bin a lot of the rest but seem to have to hang onto the tatty old books ad infinitum. We don't directly or officially recycle our waste paper because we can't afford the fee that the council charges its own departments for the collection. The fee is set exhorbitantly high so that the engineering department of the council can claw back some of the money lost in penalty charges for not meeting the targets for recycling waste.
And thus does local government work.
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