OBSERVING the large and slick promotion from Somerset Waste Partnership (SWP) to move to three-weekly collection to reduce its costs and increase its profits, I sat down to consider the effect of our “dustman” on my life as a retired and disabled old bachelor, with a small village home, not close to the roadside.

A brief tally found I currently have to put aside a volume of living space in that cottage, equivalent to that of the bed I sleep on and thus spend a third of my retirement life.

Maintaining this essential living facility is rather less than that obliged by SWP to prepare and organise for its convenience, the various descriptions of waste and refuse, SWP requires of me alone to serve its service of waste disposal to myself as a taxpayer.

Service such as segregating for collection and processing the various plastic bottles, to be sold and converted into packaging materials that are returned to me in even greater quantities to go to disposal as refuse, once the goods I have bought are put to use: say for recycling facilities at home.

With three-weekly collections, these will have to be further enlarged to render even more of my home and retirement as a transit refuse site until SWP with even fewer and more hard-worked “dustmen”, spend even longer stopped in the road, dispersing the varieties into the ever larger lorries that get blocked ever more frequently because of their size and time spent as static road blocks.

Requiring even greater space at residences will be the garden waste storage, now presumably for alternate three-weekly collection in even larger bins where I cannot myself move those currently used. Not to say how with vegetation compacted after three weeks at the bottom of the bin, this sodden and compacted mass is to be extracted quickly.

And in return every three weeks SWP will take away the huge numbers of mobile phones and batteries I have for disposal.

Evidently the scheme has been dreamed up in the accountant’s expense account without any consideration as to the practicalities or wishes of those requiring sensible waste disposal from their homes.

M J BENNING 
Langford Budville
Wellington