By Sarah Curran
A RECYCLING facility at Bloomfield Shopping Centre is to be removed later this month due to misuse.
The facility, which has been a firm fixture at the Bangor mall for around 20 years, is to be removed on or before April 30, with centre heads saying they are unable to ‘afford the time required to keep the area clean and safe’.
For years, the shopping centre hosted the service on behalf of Ards and North Down Council and Oxfam, offering local residents the ability to recycle clothes, books, paper and bottles. However fly-tipping and a general mess around the containers has become an issue over time.
Centre manager Jamie Bill, said it had been a ‘reluctant’ decision but noted that users of the service had become ‘less careful’ about what they left at the recycling containers and how they left it.
“We can no longer spare the time to clean up after people and it’s become a real problem,” he said.
Mr Bill noted said people were leaving empty bottles and bags of rubbish outside the recycling containers, even if they were empty, creating an unsightly mess which needed to be cleared away.
Acknowledging users who had been responsibly using the service, Mr Bill said: “It’s the same as when you are a child – there is always one. But unfortunately here, it is more than one and the balance has tipped.”
Bloomfield Shopping Centre was Ireland’s first carbon neutral shopping centre and while Mr Bill said that removing the recycling zone ‘goes against the grain’ of their ethos, he stated that it was no longer sustainable due to the mess being left.
“Sadly, we had recycling for paper and cardboard, books and bottles, and yet we frequently have everything from prams to PCs dumped,” Mr Bill continued, adding that even on the day they left a sign out to inform people they were closing the service, general waste was dumped on site.
With some people on social media accusing the recent booking system introduced at Household Recycling Centres by the council as a possible reason for the mess occurring at the mall’s recycling zone, Mr Bill said the zone’s use was not monitored closely enough to comment on this.
“The positive thing is that there are facilities still available, they just aren’t as convenient as using ours,” Mr Bill added.
“It’s a shame. It is reluctantly that we are doing this but we are like everybody else, we are a business. We can’t afford to go around cleaning up after people who are just dumping anything.”
Mr Bill pointed out that the decision had seen some backlash on social media with people saying the bins could have been emptied more often to make room for more recycling.
He stated that the recycling banks were very large and at times it was a struggle to keep up with the use, adding that users often dumped outside the banks even when they were not full.”
Mr Bill said that while council and Oxfam, owners of the banks, were doing as much as they could, but the recycling zone needed to be monitored constantly, adding that nobody had time to do that.
“This has been a reluctant decision but one that we hope that right-minded people will understand because it has just become an impossible task to try and keep up with the mess that surrounds it,” Mr Bill concluded.
North Down MLA, Alex Easton, said he was ‘disappointed’ by the decision to remove the recycling point which he said was ‘extremely handy’.
“I accept this maybe created a mess from time to time but that goes with the territory and it will be a big blow for recycling across Bangor and sends out a negative message from the new management at Bloomfield’s,” he said.
