I HAVE been following with interest the debate in West Wiltshire over council employees being abused while standing guard over skips.

I see we are heading toward the same silly situation in Kennet with skips, when provided, only available an hour a day (Gazette October 26).

Surely any council who provides skips in this day and age of recycling must seriously need to look deeply into its environmental policies skips just encourage irresponsible dumping of rubbish.

This all ties into the debate ongoing here over where the Devizes recycling centre will be based.

While having sympathy with residents living in the vicinity of the industrial estate at Hopton I'd like to point out that this is the logical place for the facility.

From personal experience when living in Yate several years ago I lived close to an industrial estate and accepted that the nearby recycling centre went with the territory indeed I found it a very clean, well managed and environmentally useful facility; the extra traffic generated became an acceptable fact when viewed in balance with the overall benefit to the environment.

We all have to be mindful of the fact that successive Governments have correctly signed the UK up to achieving a target, which is I believe, of recycling 25 per cent of its waste stream based on 1992 volumes by the year 2020.

To achieve this will require active participation by everyone who produces waste.

We all need to learn to minimise waste and recycle as much as we can. It can be done; Eastleigh in Hampshire has already achieved a 40 per cent recycling rate and is now working toward achieving a 50 per cent target.

This must create a great deal of envy in the Wiltshire local authorities. Eastleigh does this by having:

l Lots of glass, paper and textile recycling points

l A "two bin" system which collects dry recyclable goods one week (mixed paper/card, plastics, tins) and a non-recyclable goods bin which runs the second week

l Small 140 litre bins for most households so as to discourage high waste volumes

l Free home composters and non collection of garden waste.

They have four county-run recycling Centres as "bring" systems for aluminium foil, batteries, large household items etc as we planned at Hopton.

Non-recyclable waste is sorted by Project Integra much like the scheme so successfully operated by the Friends of Earth in Bath) at material recovery facilities around the county.

Simple isn't it?

Geoff Brewer

Downlands Road

Devizes