A waste of money? OIC homes in on refuse issues

Should Orkney deal with its own rubbish rather than paying hundreds of thousands of pounds annually to ship it elsewhere?

That was the question on the lips of several councillors on Tuesday, as they faced a £197,000 overspend in Orkney Islands Council’s waste disposal budget.

With the council spending a total of £1,082,200 on dumping refuse in the past year, on top of £744,400 to collect it, members of the OIC development and infrastructure committee are keen to find a solution — either by lobbying the Scottish Government for more funding, or by investing in a method of dealing with waste in-house.

“We need to find a local solution,” said Kirkwall West and Orphir councillor Leslie Manson, who pointed out that the shipping of waste also contradicted anti-climate change policies.

“If we cannot deal with refuse, we have to use lots of fossil fuel to get it elsewhere.”

He later added: “We have to pay money to ship it where it gets buried for a while. We need to deal with our waste responsibility at home.”