Bracknell Forest to launch incentive scheme

The scheme will see residents receive points every time they recycle through the kerbside collection service. At a meeting of the councils executive last week (November 13) councillors agreed to roll out the scheme borough-wide on April 1 2013 under a two year pilot. A report will be handed to the executive by July 2015 which will then decide the future of the scheme.

A barcode will be fitted to bins and sacks of residents taking part and will be scanned by barcode readers fitted to the collection vehicles. Residents will be credited with 200 points every time they correctly place their dry recyclables out for collection by the councils contractor SITA UK.

The points will be credited to an e-plus reward card (similar to other reward cards such as a Nectar card). Residents can then redeem the points against local leisure services and green rewards such as money off composters and water butts.

Funding for the pilot is coming from Defras reward and recognition fund which awarded Bracknell Forest with 108,000 in August 2012 (see letsrecycle.com story).

Targets

The scheme is hoped to increase the councils recycling and participation rates and help to divert material from landfill. At present, three quarters of residents in the borough recycle. In addition, 13% of what is collected at the kerbside is rejected and sent to landfill.

SITA UK operates an alternate weekly collection system on behalf of the council under a seven year contract which began in August 2011. The system sees refuse collected one week and commingled dry recyclables and garden waste the next.

Cllr Dorothy Hayes, executive member for the environment, said: Currently, three quarters of the residents in Bracknell Forest are recycling. However we would like to increase this number, and hope that the incentive scheme might encourage more residents to recycle as it avoids the need to landfill and saves us all money.

Steve Loudoun, chief officer for environment and public protection at Bracknell Forest, added: This scheme will encourage more residents to recycle and will reward them for doing so at the same time. It will also help to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill and improve the quality of recycling collected. This will, in turn, help the council meet local and national recycling targets.

Initiative

A report by Mr Loudoun, which was presented at the meeting last week, said new initiatives were needed to do this as the council was unlikely to do much better than it is at present without it.

In the report, he said: The council has done well over the years to encourage and enable more waste to be extracted for recycling. Unfortunately, all of the easy wins have now been taken and gaining each additional recycling percentage is now taking considerably more effort than in the past. We cannot afford to become complacent. Improving recycling rates is essential because of the government targets and the ever increasing cost of waste disposal.

Nectar

The council said the scheme works along the lines of the Nectar card but rather than promoting a national company, the focus is inward.

The report noted that the scheme is simpler than those already established in Wokingham and the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead which rewards residents through American-based incentive scheme RecycleBank (see letsrecycle.com story).