Wiltshire County Council, which encourages people to recycle, has been attacked by environmental campaigners and charity workers. This is not over twice monthly, or roadside collections, but their decision to send hundreds of library books to be dumped in a landfill site, ‘because it is not viable to recycle them’. Last week fiction and children's books deemed surplus to requirements, were openly dumped in a skip outside Chippenham Library.
Derek Quinn, Director for the Wiltshire Wood Recycling group, is reported as saying. "When I went to look in the skip it was full of books and some were brand new. I took some home with me because they were in great condition. It is not only books going into the landfill - it's my council tax as well."
Shelia Veech, of Friends of the Earth, said: "I am horrified that they would throw these books out - surely someone must want them.”
The council's stock manager David Green said they had no choice but to dump the consignment because at the moment they had too many books to recycle. He claims that the council only had one contractor to deal with this sort of recycling and at present it isn't a viable solution.
Its amazing that in this day where library funding is constantly under question and recycling is such a hot subject that books are thrown into the skip and buried in landfill. What also is interesting is that these sales are outside the returns and publisher’s pulping programmes. We note that what was probably common practice yesterday, is fast becoming socially unacceptable to many today.
