Friday, February 16, 2007

Does Livingstone send 10 tonnes of newspaper a day to landfill?

As anyone living in London knows, it's only people like me these days that buy daily newspapers. Most people make do with the daily free sheets of which there are now three. The Metro (in the morning) and the London Lite and the London Paper in the evening.

As you can imagine these cause quite a lot of rubbish in the Tube and buses as people have a tendancy to leave them for the next person to read. According to TfL and the Mayor, the total weight of newspaper left on the Tube alone each week day is between ten and twelve tonnes.

What happens to all this paper is a little bit of a mystery. Obviously you'd expect, given the Mayor's "imppecable" green credentials it would all be collected and recycled, but I called TfL and asked and was told by a rather timid lady that the "majority of it gets binned".

This does seem likely though as another person I spoke to said that the cleaning contractors simply litter pick the trains at each end of the line, and then bin the bags when they're full. TfL/LUL's distribution services then pick up the bins from stations, and, to this person's knowledge, do not separate rubbish but instead send it straight to land fill.

Should anyone be wondering what happens on the buses, the Mayor doesn't know as it's up to the companies that run them. So much for Livingstone's "green" strategy. I wonder if TfL would get fined for not recylcing like ordinary people might?

1 comment:

Newmania said...

I read the Telegraph , annotate and file it , the mirror , browse the Times and read the Standard. I pick up Lite , float around some blogs usually have informative book on the go .

Am I , as I suspect, close to Dizzylike news surfing level?
Or , as i now fear, am I going to deeply regret asking ?