Bexley Council in South East London is hoping to group its different materials collections together under a new contract, which will come into place when its current recycling and waste contracts come up for renewal in July 2003.
 Bexley Borough Council's waste management officer Neil Davies |
The council has a recycling rate of 21% and claims it is the top London borough for paper recycling, with a scheme that collects 10,000 tonnes a year from all 86,000 households. It also has pilot collection schemes for compostable waste, glass, plastics and cans, which it hopes will eventually all go borough-wide.
Interest
Stephen Didsbury, the council's waste and recycling manager, said: “The contract will be for all the recycling collections – paper and dry recyclables, compost too. The advert has gone out and we have had some expressions of interest.”
The new contract is likely to include an extension of the current garden and kitchen waste composting trial funded by landfill tax credits in partnership with Cleanaway and Enventure. Currently, 4,200 households receive the service on a weekly or fortnightly basis, but if it was extended to the whole borough, 16% of the total waste stream could be diverted away from landfill, the council estimates.
Bexley has also been running a glass kerbside pilot. This trial, one of the first with glass only, is run in partnership with Berrymans and London Remade. London Remade has partly funded the 55 litre collection boxes, while Berrymans provides crews and collection vehicles at no charge until the scheme ends next July.
Approximately 18,000 households now take part, generating 2.6 tonnes of glass a day and operators hope this could grow to 3 tonnes. If the glass trial went borough-wide the recycling rate could go up by 1.3%, waste management officer Neil Davies said.
Acceptable
Brian Head of Berrymans said of the glass trial: “We wanted to prove that glass could be collected at the kerbside in the UK. We're getting costs down to an acceptable level and collecting about 40% of the available glass.” But he added that in practice, costs could be higher because the trial uses a second-hand vehicle and the project is non-profit making.
The council also hopes that its dry recyclables trial of plastics and cans will be rolled out at some stage. These are collected fortnightly from 3,000 homes and sorted at Cleanaway's Rainham MRF.
The council's in-house team currently manages the borough's collections of compostable waste, paper, dry recyclables and refuse. Cleanaway sorts the dry recyclables and composts organic waste in a sealed unit, in line with the current ban on composting animal by-products. The area's paper is processed by Smurfit.
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