Birmingham to stage second attempt at recycling pilot

This time last year the council had planned to run a pilot scheme for 60,000 households in the city, collecting non-recyclable household waste on a fortnightly basis and providing a separate garden waste collection service on the alternate weeks (see letsrecycle.com story).

” By the end of the year we are confident that we will have a settled methodology that we can roll out to the entire city for the collection of green waste.“
– Jeremy Shields, Birmingham city council
But, following public opposition and council fears the pilot scheme was not taken up. The council believed that the scheme would not work and there were fears that some of the households on the scheme would be unable to store the bins between collections in a safe manner.

The council has now decided to rejuvenate the idea, with the use of plastic sacks and boxes rather than the bins that were intended for the original scheme.

Around 40,000 households in the southwest of the city will take part in the trial with half receiving weekly green collections and half receiving fortnightly. At the end of the trial, the rest of Birmingham's 400,000 households could be offered some form of green waste collection service.

Confident
Jeremy Shields, of the fleet and waste management services in Birmingham, said: “We hope to determine which scheme is the most cost effective and the six-month trial should show us that. By the end of the year we are confident that we will have a settled methodology that we can roll out to the entire city for the collection of green waste.”

The council will also be running a dry recyclable trial for 10,000 households in the city. The council is currently deciding whether the scheme should be rolled out to part of the 40,000 receiving the green waste scheme or if a separate group should be chosen for this trial.

The council intends to decipher which system will be the best way to take Birmingham towards it 2005/06 recycling target of 18%. When figures were revealed for 2003/04 it emerged that Birmingham was recycling just 10% of its household waste.

The pilot studies, which start on June 13, will last for 26 weeks and the council expects the schemes to generate about 1,250 tonnes of garden waste, paper, bottles and cans – the items collected under the scheme.