Mary Reid

The Council intends to sign a contract which will mean your rubbish will only be collected once every fortnight.

That is a complete lie.

Yet it appears on a leaflet distributed by the Conservative Tony Arbour.  He, of course, is fighting to keep his London Assembly seat against the Liberal Democrat candidate, Stephen Knight, who only needs a swing of 1.3% to unseat him.

Have the local Tories lost all sense of integrity in public life? Does Tony Arbour really think it is ethical to lie to the voters just before an election?

Back to the truth - Kingston's new waste contract will collect rubbish every week from every home. It will collect all of these each week:

Food - cooked and uncooked (meat too)
Paper
Cardboard
Plastic bottles
Glass bottles and jars
Cans and tins
Textiles and shoes
Directories
Drinks cartons (including Tetra Pak)
Household batteries

How can that possibly be described as a fortnightly waste collection? 

Now that list amounts to almost all the rubbish we produce in my home. In fact, the main things that will be left over will be packaging, and that will be collected every other week - and I, for one, am trying to buy things with as little packaging as possible these days.

The good thing about the new contract is that all the stuff collected weekly will go for recycling. That's a big improvement over the current contract, which requires us to take cardboard, textiles, drinks cartons and directories to a recycling site ourselves, doesn't include food or batteries at all, and only collects recycling fortnightly from our homes.

In the future, anything else that can be recycled, such as different plastics and foil, will be added to the list of things collected weekly.

To store our waste, we will all be given recycling boxes and free wheelie bins. Flats will all be included in the scheme.

If you like the idea of weekly recycling, with a much bigger range of materials, then you can sign the 'Back Weekly Recycling in Kingston' petition online.