'Optimise Your Kerbside Logistics'?
What does it mean to 'optimise your kerbside logistics'? The question was emailed by Stephen as Thursday's programme was on air and I read it out at the end, promising to explain in the blog - so here goes.
The phrase was used by Samantha Harding from the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The CPRE had published a report extolling the gains to be made from a money-back-on-the-bottle system for soft drinks containers - bottles and cans. It had a lot of publicity and the Prime Minister David Cameron promised during Prime Minister's Questions to look into it. For those of you too young to remember money-back-on-the-bottle used to be standard practice from the 1950s to the 1980s. You paid an extra few pence on top of the price of your drink, as a deposit on the container and claimed a refund when you took the container back. Children used to collect the bottles for pocket money and according to your emails in some parts of the world where they currently operate, lots of people leave their bottles and cans out for others to collect as a way of donating to the poor.
The Campaign for the Protection of Rural England calculates that introducing a new version of this idea would cost £84m (a one off cost) but would save local authorities £160m every year because there'd be less litter to pick up AND THEN CAME THE PHRASE 'and because they could re-optimise their kerbside logistics'.
Now clearly, this is jargon and means nothing to most of us. So I telephoned the CPRE after the programme and spoke to Jack Neill-Hall. For the record this is what happens when local authorities 're-optimise their kerbside logistics'. "If you're not collecting bottles and cans you need fewer trucks and collections, and you can make your collection more efficient by concentrating on other recyclable goods, things like plastic food trays and yoghurt pots which have a very poor recycling rate."
So there's your answer Stephen. Maybe it would have been better if Samantha Harding had said that in the first place? Or perhaps I should have pressed for an explanation on-air.
Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4
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