TONNES of plastic bottles that would have been recycled until this week will now go straight into landfill after a recycling scheme was abandoned by the county council.
For the last two years, the bottles were collected from seven sites in east Kent before being taken to a plant at Hersden, near Canterbury, and then recycled in the Midlands.
But KCC has now pulled the plug on the project because it said moving the plastic by lorry was causing more damage to the environment than it was offsetting. Some of the areas that had the collection points until this week have set up their own plastic bottle recycling schemes, but three sites in Ashford and Dover have been left with none following KCC's decision.
Phil Scrivener, spokesman for KCC, said: "The environmental and financial costs do not currently support the case for keeping these seven plastics collection bins in place at the end of the trial.
"Four of the bins are located within districts that now have popular kerbside plastics collection services - Canterbury, Shepway and, increasingly, Thanet.
"For the remaining three sites, the environmental costs of lorry movements to collect and transport plastics is actually more harmful to the environment and outweighs the benefits."
KCC said the movement of these plastics bottles from the sites to Hersden generated an extra 500 lorry movements a year during the trial. The scheme recycled 300 tonnes of plastic bottles a year.
The sites were at Cobbs Wood industrial estate, Chart Leacon, Ashford; Vauxhall Road, Canterbury; Southwall Road, Deal; Honeywood Road, Whitfield, Dover; Ross Way, Shorncliffe, Folkestone; Manston Road, Margate, and Ramsgate Road, Richborough.
POSTED: 02/04/2007 10:12:36
Bookmark with:
Email to a friend: