Residents in parts of Cumbria are to be offered discounted home food waste digesters after Cumbria council decided that a kerbside food waste collection service would be too costly in rural areas.
Councillors approved plans to subsidise home food waste digesters for residents in three of Cumbrias six districts in a cabinet meeting yesterday (April 11). The scheme is being financed through funding from the governments Weekly Waste Collection Fund,
According to the council, a kerbside food collection for the region would be more expensive as the distance between households and centralised treatment facilities would be too great.
It hopes that, by removing food waste from the residual waste stream, the scheme will improve the quality of solid recovered fuel (SRF) produced when the waste is sent for mechanical biological treatment, from which the council will take a share of the value.
The county council is using 606,230 in funding received from the Department for Communities and Local Governments (DCLG) 250 million fund to finance the project. DCLG awarded the funding to support weekly waste collections in Allerdale, Barrow and Eden and to encourage the removal of food waste from the waste streams in these areas.
Funding
However, households in the Carlisle, Copeland and South Lakeland districts of the county were not eligible for the DCLG fund, as they currently operate alternate weekly collections. However, Cumbria has said that it may seek to secure additional funding elsewhere to roll the scheme out county-wide.
A total of 443,000 of the DCLG funding will be used by the council to purchase and distribute the digesters, which will be available at a 75% discount to 6,500 homes in the districts. Householders will have to pay a contribution of between 15 and 20 each to receive a digester.
Cumbria believes that the move will reduce waste by as much as 1,300 tonnes per year, saving it around 43,000 in waste treatment and landfill costs annually.
The county council has now begun a procurement exercise to purchase the digesters, and aims to have them available to householders by summer 2013.
‘This is a great investment for the county council, which should significantly reduce our landfill costs whilst also having a positive impact on the environment.’
Jim Savege, Cumbria county council
The digestion units, which are estimated to last for around ten years, treat cooked and uncooked food, meat, fish, bones and vegetables, producing a compost output.
Costs
Jim Savege, the councils corporate director for environment, said: This is a great investment for the county council, which should significantly reduce our landfill costs whilst also having a positive impact on the environment.
Being able to offer such a large discount on the cost of the units makes them very affordable for households, and I hope will make them more attractive to buy. Given the success of home composting in the county Im expecting a lot of interest in this initiative.
Currently Cumbrias food waste that is collected alongside other residual waste and is sent to Shanks mechanical biological treatment (MBT) plants in Carlisle and Barrow, which sort the waste and produce a solid recovered fuel (SRF) for combustion. The food waste fraction that is treated at the plants is separated out and sent to landfill.
SRF
The council is set to enter a share-gain agreement with Shanks which would see it retain a proportion of the value of the sale of SRF from 2018, and believes that removal of food waste from the waste stream could improve the saleability of the SRF.
A similar scheme was previously trialled by West Sussex council, which distributed Green Cone digesters to residents free of charge but analysis suggested that only half of householders who received the digesters continued to use them after six months (see letsrecycle.com story). However, according to Cumbria, research suggests that when householders have a financial stake in the unit, it stays in use longer as residents will seek to get full value out of their purchase.
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Tanbridge district council in Surrey, Leicestershire county council and Wiltshire county council are among the local authorities currently offering subsidies for residents seeking to use home food waste digesters.
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