Microchips in wheelie bins
FOLLOWING a recent story regarding microchips in wheelie bins, Lancaster City Council would like to clarify a number of points.
The story claims that the city council has spent £100,000 on fitting microchips to its wheelie bins.
This is a gross distortion of the facts. While each wheelie bin that the council provides to residents does indeed contain a microchip, they are fitted at the point of manufacture. This adds an extra £1 to the cost of each wheelie bin. Furthermore, a significant number of these bins were purchased via external grant funding.
The chips are not currently monitored and would only ever be needed if the Government passed new legislation which required the council to charge residents based on the amount of rubbish they put out for disposal, or if councils were required to provide more detailed data on weights of household rubbish collected.
If such legislation was ever passed and wheelie bins did not contain microchips then fitting the chips retroactively would be a logistical nightmare and would also cost much more financially.
Fitting them at the point of manufacture, therefore, is more cost effective in the long run.
It is also claimed that the microchips would monitor the type of rubbish being thrown away and be an invasion of privacy. This again is a gross exaggeration.
All the microchips do is provide an identification tag for each bin – they are not a bugging or spying device as has been widely claimed.
The purpose of this simple chip is to provide each of our bins with a unique identity that can be read by an electronic reader, a bit like a bar code.
If the chips were ever used (and currently they are not) the chip itself would not be able to monitor the type of rubbish being thrown away. All it would do is allow a vehicle fitted weighing machine to tally up the weight of rubbish in a bin with the actual bin.
There are many misleading reports that seem to lead people to believe that the chips have mystical powers when, in reality, they really are no different to the identification chips people put in their cat or dog.
Date Updated: 15/03/10