Agenda item

Details of the changes to this service.

Vicki Harris Principal Waste Services Officer, gave a presentation on the upcoming changes to recycling for Wiltshire. Some of the points covered included:

•        From 30 July you would be able to recycle your plastic pots, tubs and trays, and drink and food cartons in your blue lidded bins in addition to the usual plastic bottles and cardboard.

•        This would include yoghurt pots, meat trays, margarine tubs, ice cream tubs and juice, milk and soup cartons. Please rinse and squash your recycling where possible.

•        Films and black plastic could not be recycled.

•        Black boxes would continue to be used for glass, paper, cans and textiles.

Why are we making changes?

•        Recycling saves energy, costs less and frees up space in your household waste bin.

•        These changes will help us to meet our recycling target of 50% by 2020.  Last year Wiltshire residents recycled 45% of their waste, an increase on previous years.

•        Recycling more reduces the waste which is sent to landfill and energy from waste plants.

•        Last year we sent just 20% of waste to landfill, compared to over 60% in 2007.

Future Changes

•        Collection dates for recycling, garden and non-recyclable waste would not change when the new services are introduced on 30 July.

•        All collections would remain fortnightly.

•        We will continue to work with our provider, Hills Waste Solutions, to improve recycling services and make it even easier for you to recycle at home.

•        You can keep updated on these changes and any future changes by signing up for email alerts by visiting the waste pages on council’s website. 

You can help

Town and parish councils and community groups have a key place within communities and we want to work with you to let people know about the changes. All help would be great!

–       You can put an article in your town or parish magazine and community newsletters .

–       You can put information on your town or village website or community facebook site.

–       You can put up posters within your area.

–       A waste officer could come along to your parish council meetings or other events to talk to your community about the changes – get in touch.

Don’t forget

Plastic bottles, cardboard, yoghurt pots, meat trays, margarine tubs, ice cream tubs and juice, milk and soup cartons can all go in your blue lidded bin from 30^th July. Please rinse and squash your recycling where possible.

Questions and Comments included:

·       Chair – do you know what landfill costs us? Answer: We pay a tax of £80 a Ton for landfill. Last year we spent over £3milion just in landfill tax. The environmental cost of that is huge. Our Waste Management budget for the year is £35 million.

• Do you recycle books? Answer: This is slightly tricky for us, the best way is through the household recycling centres (HRC). If you want to do it at home you have to take the pages out. We do try to reuse the books through our partners.
• Can you recycle some black plastic? Answer: No, black plastic causes us problems. All items from the blue lidded bin are sorted with optical sorters, they cannot see the carbon pigments in the black plastic so they would automatically become a contaminant for us.
• Will there be changes to the items that can go in the black bins? Answer: Our original plan was to keep the black boxes but only for glass products and use blue bin for all other products, the problem is that we have had a delay in Planning Permission to build a facility to sort the waste from the blue bin. It will not now be ready until the new year. We will come and talk about that again.
• Will you still allow more than one black box per household? Answer: Yes we will encourage as much recycling as possible if you need a second black box or blue bin, there is a form online or contact our customer services team to arrange this.
• Cllr McLennan- With regards to the green waste and other items from the black box and blue bins, what are the proceeds from recycling, and which items provide us with the best profit? Answer: From a cost point of view, there are certain types of waste we have a better value for, however not all items we collect there is a value in. We pay for wood to be recycled. We encourage people to recycle as much as they can. Garden waste is a cost for us. We have to pay for it to be composted, the value of that at the end is very low, however if we sent that to landfill the cost to us is more, and then produces problems for the environment. Incineration for non-recyclable waste has to be sent to Slough, we also have a plant in Westbury where we convert non- recycling product to fuel product.

We have assigned each property to an area board. We should be able to start getting some figures that are more in line with area board areas.

Vicki has kindly offered to visit other parish groups to circulate this information, if you are interested please contact her: vicki.harris@wiltshire.gov.uk