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'What are you suggesting I do?  Singlehandedly visit every house in the borough where they obviously need information on which day to put their waste and recycling out?'Firstly, I would email Green Redeem this weekend to ask them in future to give notification of changed collection dates as their own updates are misleading. If you don't get a satisfactory answer point out to the Council that Grundon are in breach of the spirit if not the letter of their contract by not doing this and ask them to take action.Then I would do FoI requests asking for information on the level of participation in the scheme and details of the monitoring of its effectiveness. If these show that participation is low and falling you can ask for action to be taken.To me the whole issue of Green Redeem shows that recycling isn't really being taken seriously in the borough. The scandalous diversion of funds away from something that might have had some impact doesn't seem to have attracted any response from local groups like Friends of the Earth. It is almost as if the Council recognised that a lot of people who might describe themselves as activists on the environment are primarily interested in highlighting their own virtue rather than getting into the details of how recycling rates could be improved. In countries where recycling has reached levels we could only dream of this has been done by people painstakingly looking at the details and slowly bringing up rates percentage point by percentage point. We feel we have done our job by spending lots of money on schemes which everyone knows is completely useless.

Andy Jones ● 4027d