Wokingham, Reading and Bracknell Forest Borough Councils dispose of waste via re3, our joint waste management partnership, named for the three re’s of waste: reduce, reuse, and recycle.
While it is incumbent on all of us to reduce our total waste output and reuse whatever we can, in this article I will focus on recycling. Why? Because Wokingham’s recycling rate, at around 54%, is static and well behind the 64% achieved by the best English councils.
That 54% includes our green sack, food waste and garden waste collections, as well as bottle banks and the separated streams at Smallmead and Longshot Lane.
Yet, 57% of the contents of our infamous blue bags could still have been recycled by one of those routes, and if we were to capture just half of that, our recycling rate would be well over 70%.
Why does it matter? Well firstly, our current mediocre performance is costing us real money. The blue bags and contents are incinerated at a cost of £120-130 per tonne, whereas disposing of recycling streams costs less than half of that, with food waste being as low as one-sixth of that.
In other words, for every tonne of food waste that goes into the blue bags, we are burning around £100 of your council tax that we could avoid if everyone played their part.
Also, recycling of materials contributes significantly to reducing greenhouse gas emissions compared to producing new materials, helping to tackle climate change.
And finally, there is the looming implementation of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), emanating from the 2021 Environment Act, which will create for councils a funding stream extracted from producers.
Under EPR, councils’ waste collection performance will be assessed according to the relative ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’ of their service. Councils that share some similarities will be placed within a group, wherein their costs and performance will be benchmarked against a best in class. Individual councils deemed to be sub-optimal will be given an Improvement Notice, which will specify future funding reductions if the requirements of the Notice are not met.
Taking all these factors into consideration, we are proposing to operate a weekly collection service in which food waste is collected every week, while recycling and residual rubbish take turns.
This method is used by the councils that outperform us in recycling rate and gives us a fighting chance of being benchmarked well for efficiency and effectiveness. Anybody who tells you that we can forever continue to produce millions of single-use plastic blue bags for weekly collections that cost £1 million extra per year is frankly talking rubbish.
Cllr Ian Shenton, is the Executive Member for Environment, Sport and Leisure on Wokingham Borough Council
