Walsall Council plans to install street skips to tackle fly-tipping

From the BBC:

Skips could be placed on streets in a bid to tackle repeated fly-tipping, a council has announced.

The local authority has now proposed putting a skip in each of its 20 wards every Saturday*. Clearing up fly-tipping cost the council more than £400,000 last year, bosses said.

And why on earth wouldn’t they?

1. The cost of collecting rubbish is about 1% – 2% of the selling price of new goods sold, and so anybody who wants to chuck something away has paid for the cost of having it collected ten or twenty times over via VAT.

We take our larger items to a council recycling centre; they have signs up saying “Household refuse only”. I really don’t see why they draw this distinction, businesses have paid VAT just like anybody else and have the same entitlement to dump their rubbish.

2. The test of whether something is a good idea is to imagine the opposite situation, i.e. there are plenty of skips dotted around for people to dump larger items in, and let’s assume most people do the decent thing and use them. Would any sane council announce that it intends to save a few quid by withdrawing the service? You’d hope not.

* I don;t quite understand that sentence. Will the skips just be there on day a week, or will they be emptied on Saturdays?