Carmarthenshire extends “successful” blue box scheme

The council originally collected recyclables – paper, card, cans and glass – from 10,000 homes, but over the year it has increased its weekly collection and now covers 23,000 households. The council said its blue box scheme has been a “huge success” with a take-up of between 85% and 90% among the households served so far.

The blue boxes are put out with residual waste each week, emptied into one of the council's six recycling lorries before being sent for reprocessing.

Carmarthenshire's recycling officer Karen McNeil with technical assistant Mark Beynon as the new blue boxes are distributed.

Recycling officer Karen McNeil said: “We have been overwhelmed by the success of the blue box scheme…more than 1,600 tonnes has been recycled. The scheme means the council is meeting targets on recycling and making it easier for people to recycle their waste on their own doorsteps.”

At the moment the council said it is recycling about 18% of municipal waste from the county. It hopes the kerbside expansion will be sufficient to allow it to reach its Welsh Assembly recycling target of 20% by 2005/06, by which time about 20,000 tonnes less waste will be going to landfill.

Carmarthenshire has 80,000 households, but the council said it does not currently have enough funds to offer the service to every home yet.

“We started with the most populated areas first but we ran out of money at the end of 2002/2003. We currently get to around 1,000 households each day,” said recycling technical officer at the council, Mark Bynan.

Composting
Carmarthenshire is also behind a number of schemes to make composting waste easier. In the past few weeks it has issued white starch bags to over 20,000 households for the collection of kitchen waste. More than 300 tonnes of material has been collected so far.

Bags are put out with the residual waste and taken to the Carmarthenshire Recycling Company's waste site in Nantycaws. Here the waste is composted and sold back to the public in bags.

Garden waste from a brown bag collection scheme, which runs in the North of the county, is taken to LAS waste in Lampeter, who also sell it to the public after composting. As well as this, the council sells bins for home-composting at 10 each and provides information through composting booklets.