A Year Of Bin Days

When I was putting the rubbish out this week I noticed that it is now a year since our bin collections (or at least the one for landfill) went to three weekly collections. Given that we were the pilot area for this it is possibly still too early to determine if this has made any great difference to the amount of waste recycled. I suspect that it hasn’t made that much difference and the main reason for changing was to save 50% of the cost of collections. I did, however, discover this snippet in the Council’s Spring newsletter (bottom left of page 4):

Falkirk Council was the first UK local authority to introduce the service that has led to a reduction of around 400 tonnes of material sent to landfill per month compared to same period prior to the change.

On average, the amount of waste discarded by households reduced by two kilogrammes per week and saw food waste tonnage recycled increase by as much as 75%.

If this result was replicated across the Falkirk Council area, around 9.000 tonnes of landfill material would be diverted to recycling representing a potential saving of £385K a year.

That’s actually quite impressive but it is hard to determine how much of the improvement is down to the 3 weekly collection cycle and how much is down to effective communication of what the recycling policy is. I suspect that the 75% increase in food waste collection is, in some part, down to better information which spells out that the collection is for kitchen waste (including things like cardboard from take-away pizza boxes) as much as the more emotive idea of wasting good edible food. In fact most of what goes into the waste caddy is not, and never was, edible.

It will be a while before the full effect of this policy becomes clear. The national figures for waste recycling have a lag of over a year with the current figures for 2013. Given that the new waste regime has yet to be fully rolled out it will be 2017 before we know how effective this is and I suspect that other changes may be in the pipeline – particularly as they are signed up to a zero waste strategy. I’m sure that there may still be people who will struggle with the 3 weekly waste collections: I would imagine that many foster carers would be struggling with potentially two or three young children producing more than their fair share of waste. However, the savings are not to be sniffed at – particularly as the alternative is almost literally throwing money away.