Thank you to all our crews and staff in 2020!
Published: 24 December 2020
In his regular and last feature of the year, Denis the Dustcart would like to say a huge and heartfelt Thank you to all our crews and staff in 2020!
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Christmas gives us a chance to reflect on the amazing efforts put in by people on the front lines to keep the country going during this extremely difficult year.
I’d like to invite you to join me in saying another huge thank-you to Exeter’s bin crews and all the workers in our Materials Reclamation Facility. Not only will they be working throughout the Christmas period to make sure our bins are collected and our recycling sorted, but their dedication to their work in extraordinarily challenging circumstances this year was vital in the effort to keep waste collections running and life in the city moving with a semblance of normality.
It was the MRF workers, the bin crews and everyone using their recycling bins at home who made sure we could all carry on recycling. And recycling was never more important than during lockdown. Without it, the country may have run short of packaging for essential medical and food supplies.
Cardboard was a particularly important resource in this regard, and lockdown produced so much from increased home-deliveries that many authorities struggled to collect it.
We were lucky. The systems we have in place in Exeter allowed us to process all the additional cardboard that lockdown produced. But it was the people who collected and sorted it that enabled our systems to function at all. And it was householders across the city using their green bins, storing their cardboard and working hard to reduce their grey bin waste that helped everything and everyone to keep going.
Therefore this is also a time to recognise the efforts Exeter’s householders have made this year – not only in maintaining their own recycling efforts, but in showing their appreciation to waste collection crews and recycling staff.
The ‘Wall of Thanks’ in the depot was truly a wonderful site to behold. We ran out of room in the corridor; hand-drawn pictures and notes of thanks spilled out into the lobby. Seeing so much appreciation made a real difference to the crews and MRF staff, motivating them to carry on through extremely challenging times.
Every one of them had a job that had never been more vital. Every one of them had never been busier or under more pressure in those jobs.
They have deserved every bit of the appreciation shown to them this year.
Let’s give them all a big Christmas cheer.