Recycling Units – Brook Road
Members will have seen recent publicity about the closure of the recycling units to the Brook Road Refuse Depot. As far back as 4 September 2009 your Plans Committee wrote as follows to East Dorset District Council:
We entirely support the proposal to upgrade the units on the northern site which are currently run down and seem to be largely unused.
We do however have concerns about the intention to remove the recycling containers from the southern site and introduce secure container storage on the area of land concerned. We feel that a decision on granting this change of use should be deferred for the following reasons:
(a) insufficient time has been allowed for adequate consultation with interested parties. The 10 recycling units – 2 each for paper, clothing/shoes and plastic bottles, 1 each for food/drink cartons, shoes, cans and glass bottles – are widely used by local residents. In addition the car parking spaces on the southern site allow visitors to walk round to the DCC Refuse Depot with small amounts of waste material, thus avoiding adding to the vehicle congestion in Brook Road;
(b) as far as we have been able to ascertain, no yellow site notices have been posted in the area concerned which, if this is the case, could nullify any decision taken by EDDC;
(c) no suitable and generally acceptable alternative location for the recycling units has, to the best of our knowledge, been identified. The notices at the site, about the proposed closure, recommend using Allenview Road Car Park and Sainsbury’s Ferndown as the
nearest large recycling sites. Neither of these is adjacent to a main refuse disposal depot. The smaller sites at Tesco Ferndown, Middlehill Road Colehill and the available containers at EDDC Furzehill would be unable to cope with the extra demands made on them, if the Brook Road recycling operation is closed;
(d) the change of use would render nugatory any plan, such as was put forward some time ago, to expand and revamp the Brook Road Refuse Depot.
We consider that many Wimborne and neighbouring area residents are going to be seriously inconvenienced and irritated by the proposed change of use, especially if they have not been given adequate warning of the Council’s intention. One compromise might be that, as a condition of the sale of the southern site, Mr Charman agrees to operate and manage a recycling unit as well as the locked storage containers, the site to be open to the public during the hours of opening of the DCC Refuse Depot.
To sum up we feel that the consequences of the proposed sale have not been sufficiently addressed in relation to the public response to the loss of the recycling facilities and that more time should be set aside, for this process to take place, before a final decision is taken.
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