Council's plea to supermarkets

SUPERMARKETS in the Weston area will be asked to change how they package their goods to help people recycle in the town.North Somerset Council will ask the town's branches of the grocery giants to help people recycle and reuse their rubbish as much as possible.Councillors believe a big part of the problem is the amount of packaging supermarkets use - especially the amount of plastic shrink wrapping which is difficult to recycle.Elfan Ap Rees, deputy leader of the district's Conservative party, said his party had been waiting for a chance to work with major supermarkets for two years while they were the opposition party in Weston Town Hall.Before being elected into control of North Somerset Council Tory candidates promised they would help residents recycle and reuse as much as possible.Cllr Ap Rees said: "We really need to push supermarkets to use less packaging and use packaging which is easier to recycle."We have been pushing for two years to get involved with the local supermarkets and now it's a real chance for us to work at solving the source of the problem."Recycling and rubbish collection had been a contentious election issue and the Tory party made a pledge not to follow local authorities across the country into a switch to fortnightly rubbish collections.Council and party leader Nigel Ashton said: "At the moment people have certain rubbish collected on all different days and it is ridiculous."People are quite frankly confused by the current system of when they should be putting their rubbish out and we want to make it easier for people to understand when there rubbish will be collected."At the present moment there is absolutely no reason why we would consider fortnightly collections."Unless people start recycling 80 per cent of their rubbish there is no need to go to fortnightly collections.