New waste scheme: the details

(adapted from a press release by RBK)

The new service will be rolled-out from 1 September 2008 and will allow residents to recycle a wider range of materials that will be collected more often.

The future service will see food waste and a wide range of recyclable materials collected on a weekly basis. Cardboard, liquid food and drink cartons, household batteries, telephone directories and aerosol cans are being added to the already long list of recyclable items¹ (which includes newspapers and magazines, plastic bottles, tins, cans, mixed glass and textiles).

The present Administration believes that, with so much being recycled and food waste still being collected on a weekly basis, the amount of landfill waste (refuse that cannot currently be recycled) households throw away will be dramatically reduced and will therefore only need to be collected once a fortnight.

The new recycling and landfill waste collection service was approved by the Executive Committee on Tuesday 11 March². The Executive appointed Veolia Environmental Services as the company that will work in a long-term partnership with the Council to run the new service for the next seven years, with an option to extend for a further seven.

Berrylands lessons: The new borough-wide service will be similar to the trial service that has been running amongst 2,500 households in Berrylands since March 2007.

The trial has been a great success in terms of waste minimisation and increasing recycling rates. The amount of waste recycled using the green box in the Berrylands Trial area has more than doubled and the amount of waste sent to landfill has almost halved. 91% of residents in Berrylands now regularly use the recycling collection service, compared to 44% in the rest of the Borough³.

The Council has also learnt some valuable lessons from the Berrylands trial which have influenced the design of the new service: (see also our entry of December 2006 at https://surbhillcllr.wordpress.com/2006/12/09/the-berrylands-trial/)

• The green recycling box, kitchen caddy and food waste containers were popular amongst residents in the trial, who said they were about the right size and are durable enough for the job… So they will be used in the borough-wide scheme
• But some Berrylands Trial residents said that the wheelie bin used to store their landfill waste is too small… So, the size of the wheelie bin used borough-wide will be increased from 140 Litres to 180 Litres. Larger wheelie bins will also be available to households who – despite their best recycling efforts – are not able to fit all of their landfill waste into the 180 Litre-sized bin.
• Residents in Berrylands (and the Conservative-led Scrutiny Panel – Ed.) were concerned that the black wheelie bins had a small microchip in the lid. The Council has listened to these concerns and the landfill waste wheelie bins being used for the new service will not contain a microchip.

Recycling in flats

The new and improved recycling service will not be limited to houses: flats are also set to benefit. A combination of mini recycling centres and a door-to-door collection service (based on the orange sack trial scheme) will be used.

The Executive pledges to work with resident associations, management companies and individual residents on a block-by-block basis to implement a service that meets their needs. The roll-out of these services will start in September 2008, and the plan is to have the majority of flats up and running within 12 months.

Your Ward Councillors will be keeping a close eye on developments to ensure this happens.

To support the roll-out of the new recycling and landfill waste collection service from September 2008, a comprehensive communications campaign will be run in the summer months. This will include the delivery of an information pack to every home in the Borough, dedicated Contact Centre staff to answer residents’ queries and roadshows where residents can have their questions answered face-to-face.

Details of the new service will be as follows:

Notes

• The existing chargeable garden waste collection service will be upgraded to a weekly collection using wheelie bins
• Existing arrangements for the special collection of bulk waste, furniture and white goods will remain unchanged
• An assisted collection service will be offered to disabled and/or older residents who have difficulty in presenting their containers for collection
• Residents who experience great difficulty in using the containers provided will be offered alternative options.
• New materials will be included in the collection service subject to the Council being able to find a suitable recycling plant that will accept them.

¹ New materials will be included in the new collection service subject to the Council being able to find a suitable recycling plant that will accept them

² All decisions made by Kingston Council’s Executive Committee are subject to a ‘call-in’ to the Scrutiny Panel. Call-ins must be made within five working days of the publication of the decision in the Minutes.

³ Monitored over a two-week period: 9-20 October 2006