MS Bowman (Letters, September 30) should certainly continue to compost her garden material as she currently does, and the council would recommend home composting as the best way of closing the recycling loop in the household. However, not everyone can do this. The new recycling scheme should offer positive choices for Ms Bowman and other householders.

The green waste and bulky card collected in the borough is already composted on local farms and is put back directly onto the farm land. The council has had no issues with contamination or unsuitable material being presented in the past and material is visually checked as it is offloaded. It is also regularly monitored by the Environment Agency.

Ms Bowman's tips on invasive weeds are certainly very useful, though. The council will ensure that any information concerning invasive weeds is put on its website, along with appropriate methods for disposal.

The food waste which the council collects is recycled at the Holsworthy biogas plant. This waste is composted using anaerobic digestion and the energy produced is converted into electricity which is then fed back into the national grid.

Separating out food waste can often highlight to householders how much food can be wasted, or over-bought in a week, and ideally leads to waste being reduced overall.

Overall, the organic fraction of household waste can now be recycled by every household in the borough, either through home composting, food waste recycling or green waste recycling – this is going to have a positive environmental benefit and help to reduce waste currently going to landfill.

Cllr Robert

Sampson

Chair of environment and community committee

West Devon Borough Council

MY assertion that fortnightly rubbish collections will lead to more vermin, bonfires and fly tipping is neither presumptuous nor patently ridiculous. It is simply what has happened everywhere else that has switched to fortnightly bin collections – and for entirely predictable reasons.

What's more, fortnightly collections are now out of line with national policy. Only this week, Eric Pickles has said in an interview that weekly bin collections are 'a basic right'. He also said that 'local people should make their views clear and their feelings known at the next elections'.

I hope they do.

Ann Keelan

WEST Devon Borough Council continually exhorts us to 'reduce, reuse, recycle'. How nice it would be if they took their own excellent advice.

Okehampton's Market Street car park machines (and, for all I know, the other machines in West Devon Borough Council's parking empire) are now dispensing twice as much paper as they did a month ago.

If West Devon Borough Council's Parking Gurus want to tinker with the machines, why not consider speeding them up?  Eight seconds per customer x umpteen thousand tickets per month adds up to a lot of wasted hours.

Peter Craske

South Tawton  

DID anyone at West Devon Borough Council take into account that people living in flats and apartments in Tavistock town centre may not have anywhere to store their refuse and recycling containers?

I have no garden or communal area to store my waste prior to collection and according to the leaflet five different receptacles will sit in my small kitchen - two for food, one recycling box, one card sack and one refuse sack. Of course, many more will now sit out on the kerb on collection days.

Town centre resident

Name and address supplied