Saved from landfill or stolen? What do you think?

A Wrex­ham woman is fac­ing a pos­si­ble crim­i­nal charge of theft under Sec­tion 1 of the Theft Act 1968 for alleged­ly tak­ing four green plas­tic gar­den chairs out of the land­fill skip at the local house­hold ‘recy­cling’ cen­tre.

The ‘recy­cling’ cen­tre is owned by Wrex­ham Coun­ty Bor­ough Coun­cil (WCBC) and run by the Waste ‘Recy­cling’ Group (WRG) under con­tract. The alleged theft was report­ed by WRG to WCBC, who appar­ent­ly own the stuff in the skips that they then chuck into land­fill, and it is WCBC who asked the police to inves­ti­gate the mat­ter. It also had the option of tak­ing a civ­il action under the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Act. Stop­ping peo­ple from res­cu­ing stuff from land­fill is a seri­ous busi­ness for the coun­cil.

The coun­cil’s ‘Vision, Strate­gic Aims and Pri­or­i­ties’ for 2008–9 include the fol­low­ing: “We are com­mit­ted to deal­ing with waste in the most eco­nom­i­cal and envi­ron­men­tal­ly sus­tain­able way – set­ting an aspi­ra­tional tar­get to divert 40% of munic­i­pal waste away from land­fill. We also aim to recy­cle, reuse or com­post 65% of the waste received at house­hold recy­cling cen­tres…” It is dif­fi­cult to see why the coun­cil would seek a theft charge against some­one who was help­ing to achieve that tar­get.

Instead of polite­ly telling the coun­cil not to waste their time, the cops oblig­ing­ly arrest­ed and inter­viewed the sus­pect­ed ‘thief’ just over a week ago and threat­ened to search her house and gar­den in order to recov­er the ‘stolen’ goods which they say must be returned to their ‘right­ful own­er’ (so they can be put back in the land­fill skip, pre­sum­ably). When the sus­pect answered bail today, she was told that the police would like to arrange a photo/video iden­ti­ty parade before sub­mit­ting a file to the Crown Pros­e­cu­tion Ser­vice which will have to decide whether pros­e­cut­ing the case would be good use of pub­lic mon­ey and in the pub­lic inter­est etc.

In the coun­cil’s view it is just too risky to allow any­one to take plas­tic gar­den chairs out of skips. Just sup­pose there was a prob­lem with one of the chairs, and just fur­ther sup­pose that this prob­lem was­n’t noticed and a child should sit on that chair and fall off and injure them­selves, and just sup­pose that the par­ent of that injured child came back to the coun­cil and threat­ened to sue. Just sup­pose, eh! Nev­er mind that the coun­cil is sup­posed to be con­serv­ing its dwin­dling land­fill capac­i­ty; nev­er mind that the mix­ture of plas­tics and oth­er chem­i­cals that end up in land­fill poi­son the earth and lead to babies being mis­car­ried or born with cleft palates, that chil­dren devel­op breath­ing prob­lems and tumours from liv­ing near land­fill. The caus­es of such tragedies are much hard­er to prove in the courts.

Giv­en that the sus­pect in this alleged crime has been attempt­ing to per­suade the coun­cil to set up a prop­er re-use sec­tion at each of its house­hold ‘recy­cling’ cen­tres for some time now, mak­ing polite, sen­si­ble and help­ful sug­ges­tions that have been stub­born­ly reject­ed or ignored, it is hard to avoid the con­clu­sion that the coun­cil is try­ing to shut up the trou­ble­some cit­i­zen by report­ing this ‘theft’ to the police.

Although WCBC and WRG have lots of excus­es about how a re-use scheme would not be pos­si­ble, desir­able or work­able, and could leave them open to pros­e­cu­tion if faulty goods were tak­en for re-use, coun­cils in many places includ­ing Isling­ton and the Isle of Man oper­ate just such schemes, appar­ent­ly with­out any prob­lems and keep­ing large amounts of stuff out of land­fill. The coun­cil claims that it has tried a scheme like this before but with­drawn it after com­plaints from the pub­lic. On clos­er scruti­ny, it turns out that this was a scheme where­by ‘tot­ters’ sort­ed through peo­ple’s rub­bish as they put it into the skip, which some peo­ple found upset­ting, where­as a prop­er re-use scheme would allow mem­bers of the pub­lic them­selves to select those items which might be use­ful to some­one else, and leave them in a cov­ered area with­in the recy­cling cen­tre (or else­where) for oth­er peo­ple to take for their own use.

Freecon­o­my Wrex­ham has recent­ly set up a small re-use scheme which is prov­ing very pop­u­lar, and which has sat­is­fied the Trad­ing Stan­dards depart­ment of the same WCBC that it is oper­at­ing safe­ly and respon­si­bly. It’s a bit of a mys­tery why the Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices Depart­ment of WCBC has such dif­fi­cul­ties with the con­cept of re-use, espe­cial­ly since it’s right near the top of the waste ‘hier­ar­chy’ which the coun­cil claims to be com­mit­ted to.

It does look as if the police are deter­mined that the case should be pros­e­cut­ed, and if it goes ahead, it should prove a very inter­est­ing court case. If any­one has expe­ri­ence of such cas­es, it would be good to hear from you.

freeconomywrexham_at_yahoo.co.uk