Amber Valley council in Derbyshire has announced that it will no longer be charging residents for the collection of garden waste, in a bid to boost its recycling and composting rate by around 20%.
The council, which serves around 55,000 households in the towns of Belper, Heanor, Alfreton and Ripley, currently charges a 40 yearly fee for the service, but is scrapping the charge in April in favour of free collections, to increase uptake in the scheme.
This comes at a time when many councils are choosing to charge for the service, as a way of plugging holes in their budgets (see letsrecycle.com story).
Amber Valley hopes that the move will take its recycling and composting rate from its current level of around 26.9% to a target level of 47%.
The scheme is expected to cost around 660,000 per year, but the council is expecting to finance this through recycling credit payments from Derbyshire county council which will come about as a result of it sending less waste to landfill, and savings it has made through renegotiating its collection contract with Veolia Environmental Services.
Benefit
Councillors agreed on the measure at a cabinet meeting in October, with the free fortnightly collections of green waste scheduled to start in April 2013. The Conservative-controlled council came under criticism for the move from Labour, but the council insists that the new service will be popular with residents.
A spokesman for the council said: We will be benefiting from recycling credits from Derbyshire county council and we have renegotiated the contract for our overall waste and recycling contract which has reduced the cost significantly.
We recognised that some of our neighbouring authorities offer it for free and a survey that we carried out showed that many of our residents would use the service if offered it for free.
The council is charging residents a one-off fee of 20 for the 240litre bin that will be needed to collect the green waste as it does not have the funds to purchase the bins in its budget.
The spokesman added: It was decided that there would be a charge for the bins as if they were offered to everyone for free people would say yes but wouldnt necessarily have taken up the service. We wanted to make sure that only people who would want to use it regularly did so.
Around 4,000 homes in the borough already use the paid-for service each year, and the council has had more than 10,500 additional households register for the free collections. In total, 41,000 of the 55,000 households in the Amber Valley borough are eligible for the service.
A December 17 deadline was set for householders to register for the scheme but the council has extended the deadline to allow more residents to apply.
In October 2012, the council also made broader changes to its waste collection system by switching from a source separated kerbside system to a commingled container for recycling, as well as adding plastic bottles and food containers to its kerbside collections, which it previously did not offer.
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