The council, one of the largest local authorities in England by population, has voted to begin green waste collections for 60,000 properties next month and switch residual waste collections from weekly to fortnightly.
Birmingham recycled about 13.5% of its 500,000 tonnes of waste from 400,000 households in 2003/04, and the council hopes its new collections will help it reach its statutory target of 18% in 2005/06.
The city council is also looking further ahead and is in the early stages of developing a new waste management strategy to increase its recycling rate to 30% in 2010/11 and 33% in 2015/16.
The new green waste scheme will see properties given two 240-litre wheeled bins – green for garden waste and black for residual waste. These will be collected on an alternate weekly schedule, while the existing bag-based fortnightly paper collections will continue to run alongside it.
Fortnightly
Householders will also be given bags to take glass to nearest bottle banks. The council hopes reducing residual waste collections to fortnightly will encourage householders to recycle their paper and glass as well as garden waste.
The pilot area is yet to be decided, but a 13-week green waste collection service was trialled in Northfield and Quinton in 2003/04 for 20,000 households, and these could form part of the new service. Other areas suggested by council officers include Lifford, Edgbaston and Selly Oak.
A council spokesperson said: “The areas selected will be those where recycling potential and the suitability of wheeled bins is high. One week domestic refuse will be collected in a wheeled bin along with the waste paper and cardboard using the current recycling scheme. The following week, the garden waste will be taken for composting in the second wheeled bin.”
The new service will cost 2.1m from council budget, though with a fortnightly residual waste collection rather than maintaining weekly collections, council officers believe they will save about 1.3 million a year.
The council believes Birmingham's household waste includes 12% garden waste, and said that it estimates the new green waste collections will pick up about 9,400 tonnes of material – about 1.9% of the city's total. Material will go to Tyseley Waste Disposal's facilities in Birmingham before going to composting companies within the West Midlands region.
Strategy
The garden waste service marks “Phase One” of a new waste management strategy that the city council is in the early stages of developing with its contractor, Onyx-subsidiary Tyseley Waste Disposal.
The strategy could see Birmingham households provided with a multi-material kerbside recycling service picking up paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, food and drinks cans with the possibility of textiles.
And, council officers said a new materials recycling facility would be needed to sort materials from such a service. The MRF would need to be a minimum of 40,000 tonnes per year capacity, but to take account of future recycling increases, could be designed to handle 80,000 tonnes a year.
Officers said Tyseley indicated that their preferred site for the MRF was at their site at Perry Barr in the north of Birmingham.
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