And, the council has revealed it is pressing ahead with plans to develop large-scale autoclave treatment facilities to help capture dry recyclable material out of the residual waste stream.
Commissioned at the end of February this year, the review is being carried out by the Caledonian Environment Centre – a research arm of Glasgow Caledonian University – and will offer suggestions on how to improve the city's existing recycling scheme.
The findings are due to be published in the middle of August and will look at “everything across the recycling service”, including kerbside collections, civic amenity sites and operations at the council-run materials recycling facility in Polmadie, to the south of the city.
Speaking to letsrecycle.com, Tommy McDonald, assistant director for land and environmental services at Glasgow city council, explained: “We are working with Caledonian University and Professor Jim Baird on a recycling options study and they are looking at our current arrangements on service delivery. [They are researching] how we can get more out of our existing resources and looking at arrangements for collecting materials.
“We are hopeful that an independent body can give us some indication of where to go. We initiated it and thought it was time to do something about it. As a local authority you can always do more in terms of a recycling service but we do feel it is difficult when compared to other local authorities which are less urban than Glasgow,” he added.
Glasgow hopes the findings of the study will help improve its recycling performance, with the most recent Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) figures seeing the council register a 19.5% recycling and composting rate for the rolling year January to December 2008 – the second lowest performance in the country (see letsrecycle.com story).
Four-weekly
Currently, Glasgow offers a kerbside commingled dry recyclable collection service for newspapers and magazines, food and drinks cans and plastic bottles for 107,000 (85%) single-standing properties every four weeks.
The council explained that issues over “narrow access” made it hard to provide a service for all properties. It added that it had chosen a four weekly service because it was most cost-effective, as it prevented it having to invest in more vehicles.
Communal bins meanwhile are provided for city residents living in tenements and flatted properties – which comprise 70% of the city's housing stock – and these are emptied on a fortnightly basis.
In addition, the council offers a weekly collection of residual waste and a fortnightly collection of garden waste. Material collected under the garden waste scheme is sent to the Deerdykes organics recycling facility at Croy, north of the city, or the William Tracey treatment facility in Paisley.
Despite the success the practice has achieved elsewhere, Mr McDonald said that there were currently “no proposals” to adopt alternate weekly collections for residual waste and that residual waste collections were likely “to remain weekly”.
Autoclave
While investigating how to improve its collection service, the city council confirmed that it was progressing with plans to develop large scale autoclave facilities to help cater for the disposal of up to 150,000 tonnes of residual waste each year.
Plans to invest £135 million into autoclave technology were unveiled by the council in July last year (see letsrecycle.com story), and Glasgow has now appointed Ian Telford to manage the project and is on course to go out to tender.
Rolf Matthews, assistant waste disposal manager at the city council, said: “We have got consultants on board, we did an outline business case which has been seen and approved by council and we should be going out to the full OJEU [Official Journal of the European Union] process and we are looking to get the notice out at the end of the month.”
Explaining the choice to adopt autoclave, Mr Matthews said that the use of autoclave technology could help the council tackle the problem of increasing recycling participation levels from flats and tenements in the city.
He said: “We had consultants look at the various systems, autoclave can deliver additional recyclables from the system – whether it is metals, whether it is glass, whether it is plastics, as well as delivering a fibre which has got various uses. We see that as delivering recyclables and therefore delivering diversion to support our recycling operations.”
Under its current timetable, the council intends to have a contract in place for a project partner by the end of 2009 and hopes to have the first facility at Polmadie operational by the end of 2011, with the possibility of a second and third facility coming on-line in winter 2012 and then autumn 2013.
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