From Wednesday, the council is piloting a new kerbside collection scheme for plastic bottles in five areas, covering about 7,500 households.
” This will enable us to develop a plastics recycling service for next year that is user-friendly and accessible. “
– Cllr Irwin Van Colle, Brent council
The new scheme comes in response to requests from the public, the council said.
The trial scheme will last until March 2007, and lessons learned will then be used when the plastics collection services is expanded borough-wide.
Each household on the trial has been given 40 green plastic sacks for plastic bottles including drinks containers, toiletries and cleaning product bottles. If they fill their sacks, residents will be allowed to use clearly-labelled carrier bags.
Collected plastics are being sent to Pearce Recycling in St Albans for reprocessing.
Participation
The households chosen to take part in the trial are all in areas where recycling is at a “medium” level – where collections take in an average of 1.8kg of recyclable material per household each week.
By allowing these householders to put out plastic bottles in the bags next to their kerbside boxes each week, the council hopes their overall recycling participation will increase.
Cllr Irwin Van Colle, Brent Council's lead member for environment, planning and culture, said: “The trial run of the plastics recycling scheme is designed to encourage people to recycle even more household waste and we look forward to hearing the feedback from the participants. This will enable us to develop a plastics recycling service for next year that is user-friendly and accessible to all.”
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Brent council exceeded its target of recycling 18% of household waste this year, and is now aiming at a 30% rate for 2010.
Cllr Colle added: “The council is working hard to ensure that residents have access to a range of recycling methods for a variety of materials, in order to create a much greener and cleaner Brent.”
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