By Cllr Ian Shenton
I’m going to talk rubbish. Some people would say, “So what’s new”, but what’s new is that, after four months as Executive Member for Environment, Sport and Leisure, I know enough to talk coherently about rubbish.
Wokingham Borough Council disposes of your household waste via a three-way partnership with Reading and Bracknell Forest, known as re3. It is passed to their tender, loving care when our collection vehicles reach either the Smallmead or Longshot Lane Household Waste Recycling Centres. There it is prepared for its onward journey.
Dry recycling, from your green sacks, is sorted by material and sent on to specialist handling.
Your garden waste goes on to be composted, and food waste heads to Oxfordshire where it spends 85 days turning into digestate, an agricultural fertiliser, while gently burping methane that is burnt to produce power.
The fabled blue bags, containing what we call residual waste, are mostly consigned to a fiery fate at an Energy from Waste (EfW) plant.
This all comes at a cost, which we pay out of council tax.
Landfill, which we use for items like asbestos that can’t be incinerated, is the most expensive, but EfW disposal of residual waste is only slightly cheaper at well over £100 per tonne. Dry recycling costs us a little less than half of EfW, and food waste recycling costs us less than half of dry recycling.
So, for every recyclable item that we put in our blue bags, we are literally and unnecessarily burning our council tax.
But the sting in the tail is that, within re3, Wokingham has been left behind by Bracknell and Reading, who have successfully increased recycling and reduced residual tonnage by changing the way in which they collect waste.
Reading collects recycling and residual waste in alternate weeks, while Bracknell collects recycling fortnightly and residual three-weekly, methods now used by more than 240 other English councils.
All of us collect food waste weekly.
The net result is that Wokingham now pays almost 40% of the cost of re3 and will continue to do so until we get our recycling up and our residual tonnage down.
The experience of over 240 English councils proves that this is precisely what happens when collection cycles are adjusted, and Wokingham can no longer afford the luxury of everything weekly.
Yet strangely, Wokingham’s Conservatives have planted their flag on sticking with the existing 20th century system, rather than something suited to the third decade of the 21st century.
Perhaps we should not be surprised as their incompetent government has already taken the whole country back to the 1970s.
Cllr Ian Shenton is the Executive Member for Environment, Sport and Leisure and Liberal Democrat ward member for Evendons
