If it's Tuesday, it must be Green Box day

Tomorrow, the collection day for the green box scheme moves to Tuesday for the whole of East Acton ward (indeed for the whole of Acton). This is a change for many of the roads that are covered by what is officially called the kerbside recycling scheme. You still need to put your green boxes out before 7.30 am in order to ensure that they are collected. As before the boxes will take bottles, jars, cans, paper, aluminum foil, batteries, shoes, clothes, engine oil and yellow pages.

My green box in my (overgrown) garden

The green box scheme has been one of the great success stories of the local Council since Labour introduced it in 1994. One of the original pilot areas was the East Acton Estate, and I must admit that I was a bit cynical about whether it would work in a mainly working class area like this. However, in practice, East Acton’s beer bottles matched Acton Green’s chardonnay bottles, and Hanger Hill’s champagne bottles. Whilst there is a variation in take-up of the scheme across the Borough, and East Acton ward has one of the lower usages, affluent Ealing Common is a worse performer than us. The Borough now has a recycling rate of around 20%, compared to virtually zero before the scheme started from 1994.

The scheme was basically devised and managed by ECTR – a local social enterprise (the ‘E’ is for Ealing). It was their first contract in the recycling field, although they have subsequently grown to a multi-million pound operation. As I reported in my post on 8th September, ECRT now have the Borough-wide integrated ‘clean and green’ contract for street cleaning, refuse collection and recycling, and are also tomorrow starting the new food waste recycling scheme to our neighbours in Acton Central ward. The food waste recycling scheme is being rolled out ward by ward, so will get to East Acton in time.

ECTR’s website is http://www.ectgroup.co.uk/index.php?sa=2&sg=1&m_about=true

Unusually no meetings tonight, so I took the rare chance to catch the evening game at QPR. We lost 3 : 1 to Crystal Palace, with some defending as poor as a Tory election campaign – blue, leaky and disunited. I’ve also got a ticket for the Plymouth game in a couple of weeks, so I’ll save posting about the QPR-East Acton connection until then, when I’m hopefully in a better mood after a better result.

Drowned my sorrows afterwards in the West London Trade Union Club. I had some excellent pints of Wadsworth 6X – not normally one of my favourite beers – but my wine-drinking colleagues raved about the Fair Trade Cape Cabernet Sauvignon that they drank.