Regulate Scrap Metal Collectors
Suggested by colint and tagged regulation, scrap dealers, trade body, trading standards. 1 Comment.
The big idea
Bring the growing 'community' of scrap metial collectors/dealers into a lawfully-managed framework.
Limit the frequency of collections. Give people the right to know where their scrap metal is going.
Allow genuine operators to prosper, but stop cowboys or rogue traders operating.
Why does this matter?
Writing from an urban city, in past years scrap metail dealers were a novelty. Recently, they have become very frequent, active and almost a menace. Drive plain lorries, with no name markings. Many lorries are very poorly maintained, drivers drive with almost no care for pedestrians, other drivers and for the households. Spend more time looking a houses, not looking for traffic, rarely signal when turning.
Sirens are getting louder, tactics are getting bolder – to point of knocking on doors, peering through gardens and even stealing material they see as scrap. In my own neighbourhood we are now getting at least one "scrap" lorry every day and have had three trundle round on same saturday pm,
Yet trading standards tell us these dealers have no trade body, need no licence to deal and do not need to give their identity. Police are reluctant to take action for barely-roadworthy vehicles. So households and neighbourhoods continue to suffer annoyance and harrassment. This must change. We deserve to live in reasonable peace. If we have scrap to dispose of, we would call our local council or a licenced waste company.
What is more. If any of these operators were linked to crime gangs – how would we know? They are very noisy but keep their identify otherwise completely secret.
Regulation of this form of waste collection is long overdue. I had an incident this week where scrap collectors (who travel through the town with megaphones) picked up somone’s old Alluminium framed windows and set about smashing the glass out in their van whilst still at the roadside. Not only did they leave a huge ammount of glass in the road, they also thought it acceptable to dump a car tire on the pavement. Since moving to this area 6 months ago, I’ve now counted six different collection wehicles operating in a relatively small area. Only one of these operators has a van with the name of the company and a telephone number on it. The rest are rusting hulks that should be scrapped.