Bin collections where next?

The debate surrounding the pros and cons of more frequent bin collections is beginning again. Eric Pickles, in an interview with the Telegraph, stated that if the Conservatives should win the 2015 election, weekly bin collections will become a statutory requirement. This is against the backdrop of more and more local authorities switching to fortnightly or even longer bin collections.

Lowering the frequency of bin collections may well be due to ever-tightening budgets with local authorities having to seek savings in the provision of public services. Is this a bad thing? It depends on a lot of things! As already noted, it may be in response to the need to further cut back on expenditure in the face of reduced funds coming from central government.

The benefit or cost of reducing the frequency of bin collections will then depend on what else might have been cut back in lieu of this. If not directly in response to cutbacks in central government expenditure, the decision to limit the frequency of bin collections may be in response to the need for increased expenditure elsewhere in the public sector and the benefit/cost of this will obviously depend on the nature of the benefit of this increased expenditure elsewhere.

But aside from these budgetary issues, is there any merit in cutting back on the frequency of bins collections? Our research carried out at the University of Bath and published in Ecological Economics in 2011 found that cutting back on the frequency of bin collections could yield an increase in household recycling (see letsrecycle.com story).

Reducing capacity; increasing recycling

Our analysis covered the period 2006 to 2008 and so did not include food waste collections which have become more prevalent in recent times. We explained this result in the following way: making it more difficult for householders to dispose of their waste encourages them to think more carefully about how to dispose of it. In order to reduce the size of their bin bag they divert recyclable waste more effectively leading to increased volumes collected at the kerbside. Although not included in our analysis this thinking would lead us to expect that recycling volumes would increase even further once food waste is included.

It is important for us not to isolate bin collections or recycling when thinking about waste management service provision as the two are intrinsically linked what is not recycled becomes residual waste which is then landfilled. Thus, within a waste management structure a decrease in bin collections does not necessarily constitute a decrease in the quality of service provision. Indeed, we would go further and state that in the light of our results, as long as a reduction in frequency of bin collections is accompanied by a weekly food waste collection, reducing the frequency of bin collections is an increase in quality of waste management provision due to enhanced recycling.

Legislation

Linking these two issues together budgetary and recycling performance is the UK obligation to comply with the EU Waste Directive of reaching the target of 50% household recycling by 2020. Despite making dramatic progress in increasing recycling rates rising from less than 1% in the early 80s to just over 40% in 2012/13 it may be that further gains of similar magnitude and rate of achievement will be much more difficult to obtain as the relatively easy methods have been exploited first. At the moment, there is no evidence of policymakers resorting to economic measures applied at household level to increase recycling and/or reduce the production of waste.

In addition, there appears to be an appetite for creating the context to enable decision-makers to choose the right decision the so called nudge theory. The correct context in this case appears to be creating the right balance between recycling and residual waste collections with more emphasis on recycling and less on waste to steer households to think more carefully about what they do with their waste.