Co-founders of CROW

 Eric Murray

 I moved from London to Oxford in June 2005 and was struck by the cleanliness of Oxford City compared to the outer London Borough I had left behind.  As a dedicated recycler, as soon as I arrived in Oxford, I contacted the council to obtain details of their recycling scheme. This scheme was very similar to the one I had been used to and I continued to recycle paper, bottles, cans, textiles, cardboard and garden waste.

 I was therefore horrified to learn that the council was planning to reduce our weekly collections by introducing  Alternate Weekly Collections.  So concerned did I become at what this would mean in a city where so many houses are either in an area of multiple occupation or closely packed together and without front gardens, let alone what the consequences would be given our new ever hotter summers, that I set about finding or setting up a protest  group. First of all I joined the national campaign for weekly waste collection and through this made contact with Annie Skinner. We soon realised that we had to have an Oxford group and after a short time we founded CROW. Sadly my fears have come true as we have seen parts of our city turn into roadside rubbish dumps 

Annie Skinner

 Our family has been recycling as much as we could for years and were frustrated by the limitations of the recycling services in Oxford. When I first discovered what the new scheme would mean in our community I was horrified. Instead of improving the service it only provides the additional ability to recycle plastic bottles at the expense of having household waste collected every two weeks with ugly wheelie bins. Additionally, because we live in a densely populated area with lots of houses of multiple-occupation (HMOs) with a high turnover of occupants then this system has the capacity to cause many environmental health problems. I signed up to the national weekly waste campaign who put me in touch with Eric Murray last autumn before the new scheme was introduced. We decided to start the campaign  Collect Refuse in Oxford Weekly (CROW) because we saw that there was concern about the new scheme in the city. Our intention was to provide a forum where people could share national and local information related to alternate weekly collections and refuse collection in general with a view to passing this on to the council in our campaign for a change in policy. Since we started CROW in January this year we have been inundated with enquiries. Our original website was not sufficient to cope with the demand so we are very pleased to have this website and grateful to all those who helped get it organised. We hope people will benefit from the use of this website and encourage you to recommend it to others.