Exeter needs a glass revolution!

Glass is a fantastic material: it’s re-usable, easily to clean, and 100% recyclable. Recycling glass not only saves raw materials, but the process uses 40% less energy than making glass from scratch. It can be made into more glass or non-harmful insulation, and furnaces can be powered by electricity from renewables.

However, because glass is inert, it takes millions of years to decompose. This is all the more reason to sort it out now! From shards to bottles, glass litters our streets and green spaces. Take a walk around our city and litter is not at all difficult to find.

The City Council has been dominated by Labour for the past 10 years. This means accountability is limited, they rule with an alarming lack of transparency, and make numerous poor value-for-money decisions. For example, Labour wasted over £50 million of taxpayers’ money on their St Sidwell’s Point vanity project. This has caused budgets to be slashed in other hugely valuable areas.

Basic services, such as the City Council’s hard-working environmental health teams, who tackle litter, have been starved of funding.

The council has not been emptying public recycling banks frequently enough. This causes rubbish to accumulate as people understandably don’t want to lug all their glass back home and out again to find it’s once again full. Instead of responding by emptying bins more frequently or increasing capacity, or monitoring, enforcement, and education to tackle illegal fly-tipping, the council have actually removed public recycling bins. This increases the frequency with which the few remaining bins need to be emptied and only makes it more difficult to recycle.

Plans for household glass recycling, promised by Labour 4 years ago, have been scrapped. This has contributed to Labour Exeter's rubbish recycling rate - declining over 10% under their control to the lowest in the South West by far at just 25.5%. Lib Dems actually care about recycling, hence the top 6 councils for recycling are all Lib Dem-led.

At the national level, glass bottle standardisation and a returns scheme would sky-rocket glass re-use. This would help reduce pollution, provide an extra incentive for litter picking, and mean more economic options for the poorest.

A glass revolution will help make it easier for people to tackle both the climate (pollution) and ecological crisis (indirect pollution and littering).

Vote for a party that takes our environment seriously: vote Lib Dem this 4th May.