AS THE manager of a small business, I am appalled at the amount of cardboard waste I weekly consign to landfill.

Although as a business we operate a mail order service, we cannot recycle all the corrugated cardboard boxes we receive daily.

Wealden District Council is allegedly committed to recycling, but when the chips are down it is only at a cost. We can have a bin for recycling but we are charged for the privilege.

When challenged, the council’s excuse is it derives no benefit from our business rates and that it would be inequitable for council tax payers to foot the bill. Instead all business rates are apparently given to central Government.

At home I recycle as much as I can and was recycling before green bins and other forms of collection were introduced.

It therefore becomes hard to send good material to landfill, where it is lost forever, rather than recycling and preserving the resources we have.

The only option we have is to take cardboard to the local tip, which means having to find somewhere to park and having a suitable vehicle and the time, as a small business, to carry this out.

It is disappointing that commitments to recycling appear so often only skin deep at local authority level. Little or nothing is done (except for a remuneration) to protect and preserve our ever-increasingly stretched resources.

EW Parkman, manager, Camera Centre, High Street, Hailsham

I AGREE that communal bins would be a good idea and that the recycling system in Brighton is in dire need of overhaul (The Argus, June 28).

It does not surprise me that recycling figures have plummeted as I cannot remember when my recycling box was last emptied. When I lived in Suffolk, all of my recyclables were simply placed into one wheelie bin which was collected without fail every week.

In Brighton, I am expected to remove labels from tins and bottles, wash them out, squash them, flatten cardboard boxes, store them for up to two weeks and then pack them into the black recycling boxes. Having gone to all of this trouble, to add insult to injury, the boxes are “missed” or not emptied despite always being left out by 7am on the correct day.

In the past I have left answerphone messages with Cityclean or emailed complaining about missed collections but there is never any apology and rarely are items cleared the following day.

On one occasion, the excuse given was that my road was “inaccessible”. The thoroughfare in question is not some obscure cul-de-sac, perched halfway up the Downs, but Hollingdean Road along which every dustcart and recycling lorry passes at least twice a day to and from their depot.

The problem of non-collection has become so bad for me that I no longer bother to put my box out, preferring to use public recycling points outside the Sainsbury’s and Co-op stores in Lewes Road instead.

I simply feel I’m wasting my time trying to use the doorstep collection service.

If councils can fine people who leave their refuse out on the wrong days, I think householders should be able to fine the council when refuse left out on the correct day is not collected.

Come on Cityclean – get your act together, and install those communal bins.

William Rice, Hollingdean Road, Brighton