AT LEAST 50 unwanted but usable ring binders and box files were binned by staff at Brentwood Borough Council on Friday, leading to accusations that the authority is "failing to make every penny count".
The stationery was placed in a blue wheelie bin outside the Town Hall in Ingrave Road and was spotted on Saturday morning by John Brandler, 57, the owner of Brandler Galleries in Coptfold Road.
Mr Brandler, who had been disposing of some damp cardboard at the time, said: "Why just throw them away?
"Why not give them to a local charity?
"This is such a waste of money – although it isn't a waste if you are the contractor who supplies the council with new stationery."
The accusation of wasteful spending comes after the borough council revealed that 55 per cent of all waste collected in the borough was recycled in the three month period between April and July this year.
Councillor William Lloyd, the vice-chairman of the council's environment panel, said he was "disappointed" to see reusable files being binned.
"The council is telling residents 'reduce, reuse and recycle', and recycle is the last thing you should get to," he said. "We have got a lot of groups here such as Brentwood Community Print which could have benefited." He added: "This is an example of when the council should practise what it preaches."
Pressure group The TaxPayers' Alliance was not impressed to hear about the clear-out. Campaign manager Robert Oxley said: "Brentwood Borough Council can't afford to throw out perfectly good stationery. These folders may not cost the earth but binning them so needlessly implies that council staff are failing to make every penny count.
"If the Town Hall doesn't need the binders then the least they could have done is donated them to a worthy cause."
Liberal Democrat opposition group leader David Kendall said: "I would have thought that if they were in good condition then they could have been saved.
"It is just a case of taking out the contents and saving the ring binders."
Councillor Mike Le-Surf, the leader of the council's minority Labour group, added: "If they could be put to some use then that would be a good idea."
A council spokesman said: "We are always keen to give a good home to anything we have finished using and that can not be sold.
"We will endeavour to contact local voluntary organisations when we next have surplus equipment at the Town Hall to see if these items are useful.
"But we have found that some storage equipment that we no longer use (because of the digitisation of our data; such as ring binders and box files) is also no longer of much interest to many in the voluntary sector."
However, Tim Warncken, a director at Brentwood Community Print, said: "I am sure we could use these files."
