Cr Cameron says he is campaigning for weekly rubbish collections and a hard waste collection service yet it seems he is against the small businesses in the community that are picking up the slack and actually providing these services. Even worse, he wants to punish them for it.

I would ask Cr Cameron to take a moment and think about it. Small businesses in this industry do not produce the waste. Small businesses are only facilitating the transport of waste from local residents and businesses to the Albury tip.

The notion that residents should pay more because they are elderly, suffer from a disability, are single parents, etc is completely out of touch and would only be agreed upon by a bunch of suits paid well above the average wage.

As less people have tow-bars and access to trailers, more people are relying on the ingenuity of local small business people to provide affordable means of dealing with household waste, which council has chosen to profiteer from. A charge of $5 for 100 kilograms seems fair to Darren Cameron but a week ago it was $5 for 200kg, and it was only available to those that brought their own rubbish in a trailer. If you pay for a rubbish collection service to take your rubbish to the tip you pay triple the fee.

I've been providing waste removal services to Albury and Wodonga for five years, mostly in the domestic market, and one in 60 collections would be 100kg or less.

Maybe when no one responded to council’s attempt to notify us of impending changes, it was a sign that council had not communicated the said impending changes effectively. Council was able to find my contact details to send me a notice of the changes but somehow it was too hard for them to use the same contact details to engage in a discussion on this issue.

Like most politicians, they don't get it. We aren't asking for concessions, a hand out or a special deal. We just want a fair system for local ratepayers.

John Moore is clearly disenchanted with renewable energy and put forward an interesting argument against it (‘Renewables unreliable’, The Border Mail, July 4).

I have had a small solar system for several years. It has massively reduced my power bills over that time.  The hot water alone used to take up one third of the power bill. I now only pay for hot water for a short time during the winter. So far my system has created 22,103 kWh of power, some being used by me and the rest being sent to the grid to be used by others.

I knew when it was put in that it would not cover all of my requirements all year round. However, like any good plan, I had the grid as backup when the sun did not provide sufficient for my needs. 

If you purchased a car that only had a maximum of 14 hours fuel available to run it per day, and did not have a supplementary plan to kick in when the 14 hours’ worth was used up, you clearly would not have thought through your purchase.

I respect your views to not embrace renewables, but please don’t undermine the decisions of those of us who have thought through our decision to utilise solar etc. and have chosen to take advantage of modern renewable energy.