Freedom Of Information Request To Royal Mail by Steve Woods, 10 December 2008:
Dear Sir or Madam,
I cannot help noticing that all the streets round my area of Bristol are frequently littered with the rubber bands used to collate bundles of post for mail deliveries. In the light of this could you inform me:
1. How many elastic bands - in terms of either numbers or weight - does the Royal Mail procure and/or consume per year?
2. How many postal delivery workers have been fined or successfully prosecuted for dropping litter (i.e. the said elastic bands) in the last year for which records are available?
3. What steps are being made by the Royal Mail to stop such littering and to recycle elastic bands?
Yours faithfully,
Steve Woods
………………………………..
Royal Mail Group Limited Reply 12 January 2009:
Dear Mr Woods,
Thank you for your request for information by e mail received on the 10th December 2008. We can confirm Royal Mail holds this information. In your request you specifically asked for:
1. How many elastic bands - in terms of either numbers or weight -does the Royal Mail procure and/or consume per year?
For the last three years, the number of rubber bands used by Royal Mail was:
2007/8 871,695,000
2006/7 825,750,000
2005/6 753,480,000
2. How many postal delivery workers have been fined or successfully prosecuted for dropping litter (i.e. the said elastic bands) in the last year for which records are available?
Royal Mail Group has not been served with a fixed penalty notice or prosecuted for a littering offence under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 arising from the discarding of elastic bands. Royal Mail Group would
not necessarily become aware of such action being taken against individuals. However, we are not aware of any delivery officer having been prosecuted for littering when discarding elastic bands.
3. What steps are being made by the Royal Mail to stop such littering and
to recycle elastic bands?
Royal Mail re-uses many millions of rubber bands each year and bands are generally re-used within delivery offices and mail centres. We remind our people about the benefits of re-using bands and also ask them not to discard them after use.
Royal Mail uses millions of rubber bands each year because they are very useful when it comes to sorting and delivering the mail. Unfortunately, given the quantity that we use it is inevitable that some rubber bands will be dropped by mistake. The vast majority of our people are hard working and conscientious but, and as with any labour intensive organisation, errors will occasionally happen. Issues concerning the environment are very important to us, in particular those of street cleanliness and recycling. The rubber bands we use are specifically designed to be more biodegradable than the normal brown rubber bands and this is intended to lessen the environmental impact.
Going forwards we have a number of process reengineering initiatives that should reduce the volume of elastic bands we use in our operation:
• collection reengineering
• customer traying
• Reengineering mail handling equipment
If you are dissatisfied with the handling of your request you do have a right to request an internal review, in which case please write to the Head of Information Compliance, Royal Mail House, Company Secretary's Office, 5th Floor, 148 Old Street, LONDON, EC1V 9HQ. An internal panel will then review the request, and you will be advised of the outcome.
If, having requested an internal review by Royal Mail, you are still not
satisfied with our response you also have a right of appeal to the
Information Commissioner at:
Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Telephone: 01625 545 700
www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk
Yours sincerely,
Marie Teasdale
Freedom of Information Case Officer
Company Secretary's Office
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