Brent Council has trailed in the press some radical ideas around changing the waste collection, including charging for garden waste and introducing weekly recycling. They are the most dramatic change to be proposed to Brent waste collection since I advocated the introduction of the blue top bins, which led to an immediate improvement in recycling.
These new ideas merit more than one post, so for the moment I will just concentrate on the dry recycling collections.
The key success of the 2011 changes was to get people to take waste from their landfill bins and put it in their new recycling bins. We did this first of all by having much bigger bins. The old green boxes contained only 44 litres; the blue top bins could carry 240 litres. The blue top bins were also covered, so stuff was less likely to blow out, or be dropped. We also extended the range of materials collected to include mixed plastics and tetrapaks. As a result there was a big jump in recycling tonnage.
What concerns me about the new proposals is how much dry recycling is now left in the landfill bins? It must be a much smaller proportion than in 2011. Will doubling the collection rate lead to an increase if most of the dry recycling is now going in the blue top bins anyway? I suspect that anyone not putting dry recycling in their blue top bin will be very hard to engage, so even if they have a lot of stuff going to landfill that shouldn't simply increasing their collection frequency may not be the best way to increase the recycling tonnage.
West London Waste has done a certain amount of research in the composition of landfill waste in Brent bins, and I hope officers are drawing on this. Similarly sources like WRAP may help. It would be good if such evidence could be made publicly available in the report when published.
I will return to another aspect of all this tomorrow.
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