Matthew Revell

Wolverhampton City Council collects glass, paper, metal and garden waste in its kerbside recycling collection.

Note: not plastic or cardboard.

A few weeks back, I asked one of Wolverhampton’s Conservative councillors why there was no kerbside collection for plastic and cardboard. Apparently, he told me, the ruling Labour group were planning to introduce it in the next few weeks.

According to The Stirrer, though, we might have a longer wait, citing an additional cost of £500,000 (presumably annually) to fund the service. The reason? Well, The Stirrer makes the suggestion that the cost is linked to Wolverhampton’s municipal incinerator. Plastic burns well and generates lots of electricity, so says the article. Recycle that plastic, rather than send it into the already sweet air of the city, and the council loses money from electricity generation.

£500,000 is roughly 1.25% of the council’s annual budget. In a city where - as I understand it - only 10% of households actually pay council tax and the council has long had a reputation for financial incompetence, that’s a lot of money.

I’ll have a dig around to see if I can find out anything more concrete.

Update 27.07.2007: See the comments for Political Penguin’s stats on council tax in Wolverhampton. I’ve been unable to get corroboration for the 10% figure and so please disregard it. I still think it’s an interesting question: should we recycle plastic or burn it for energy?

Wolverhampton Freeycle has quietly been building up over the past few months.

With virtually no promotion, there are now 601 of us giving away useful items and benefitting from the things that other members no longer need. It’s great to get rid of something and know that someone else can make use of it, when it would otherwise go in the dump.

Rob and I have been thinking, for a while, that we’d like to build something more out of the community that has developed around Wolves Freecycle. The Freecycle group itself works best when dedicated to messages offering or requesting items. Also, the original American Freecycle group is very specific about how its trademark should be used.

Freecycle groups are run using the Yahoo Groups system, which is a mailing-list/forum hybrid. Several other Freecycle groups have created what they call their cafe group, also using the Yahoo system. We felt that was too limiting: not only are you bound to accept Yahoo’s advertising but you have no room for future growth, when people have good ideas for new features.

A couple of weeks ago, we set up panoplee.com and began looking for suitable forum software. It’s frustrating that almost all forum software is virtually identical, in terms of clunky user experience, despite their authors’ protestations to the contrary. Vanilla, however, is clean, fast and user-friendly.

We’re now telling people about panoplee.com. I’m surprised that a city the size of Wolverhampton doesn’t already have something similar.

Wolverhampton community website.