Wallace vows to stand against council

Michael Wallace, owner of the eponymous recycling company, has vowed to stand firm against the council's insistence that he changes from weekly to fortnightly bin collections.Mr Wallace who built his company from scratch 12 years ago and is based in Mullingar said that he was committed to providing the best possible customer service which meant continuing to provide weekly collections.He also denied that his customers were not recycling properly and instead were filling "residue" or household bins.But under council by-laws which are currently in place in most parts of Ireland waste collectors must only collect residue or household waste the same number of times as recycled waste, which is once every two weeks."But what about families like mine?" said Mr Wallace. "I have three children and many of my customers are in the same boat. Does anyone realise the amount of waste a family can produce over a week? What about waste like nappies, not collecting bins every week is just asking for trouble."I run a recycling company and so I think that I know how to recycle waste but I still need my other bin emptied every week. This isn't about money, it's actually costing me to provide a weekly service because I have to send men out on a run where only some people need their bin emptied every week. It's for those families, like mine, that I continue to do it."Speaking this week Hugh O'Reilly who is in charge of waste collection for Westmeath County Council said that the body had no current plans to take action against Mr Wallace."He has been given a time frame to comply with our requests and when that runs out we will see what course of action we will take," he said."There is nothing unusual about our request and we are simply asking that Wallace Recycling complies with the current by-laws. We are currently hoping to roll out the brown bin scheme across the town which should mean that people don't have a problem with emptying their residue bins quite so often. The brown bin will be for all kitchen waste, the residue or black bin will then be for everything else that either can't go into the brown bin or be recycled."We are not saying that people are not recycling properly now, all we are saying is that a fortnightly collection would appear to encourage people to recycle more thoroughly."We hope that the brown bin service will be up and running in town by the second half of the year and we hope that all waste management companies will be civic minded and co-operate with us."