The start of June has seen both Ealing Council and Harrow borough council launch green waste kerbside collections, while Durham County Council began a home composting promotion.
Ealing
All 118,000 households in Ealing are being offered fortnightly collections with the help of about 500,000 received from the London Recycling Fund. Collections will be carried out by ECT recycling, which charges 50p per special bag bought for the scheme. This covers the cost of the sacks, which are biodegradable.
Ealing currently recycles about 11% of its total waste, but the target set by the government is 20% by next April. The council expects to recycle 1,200 tonnes of green waste this year from the scheme, which will run from June to November 2003 – the peak period for garden green waste. Collections will resume in April 2004.
Harrow
In Harrow, a 481,000 award from the London Recycling Fund has allowed the council to set up garden waste collection trials for 12,000 households. Households in 10 pilot areas will receive brown wheeled bins for green garden waste fortnightly collections.
Harrow borough council hopes to collect 2,800 tonnes organic waste in the first year of the scheme, after which it will meet the annual running costs of 80,000 per year itself. But a spokesman said more government funding would be needed in order to expand collections across the borough. Harrow recycles 9.6% but must increase this to 25.2% by 2006.
Durham
Meanwhile, Durham County Council is giving residents the chance to try out home composting free for 60 days. Thanks to a deal with Leeds-based bin suppliers Blackwall, residents will be allowed to buy the containers at discount prices of 15 and 20 rather than 39.95 and 49.95 at the end of the trial if they want.
If all householders in the area composted all their organic waste, 83,100 tonnes of waste could potentially be diverted from landfill every year.
The new schemes raise the issue of whether green waste collection or home composting better serves the environment. Anne O'B;rien, special projects manager at WRAP, which has been given the remit of encouraging home composting, said that both practices were valuable.
“Neither of the two is mutually exclusive. They can work very effectively together in the same location,” she said. “Home composting can help people to understand why composting is important and how it works and it can help encourage people to take their surplus green waste to CA sites.”
As well as green waste collections, Ealing and Harrow both subsidise home composting bins for residents at about 10 per bin. And in County Durham, Durham city and Sedgefield borough councils offer residents green waste collections.
By the end of this summer, WRAP will launch a programme dedicated to encouraging home composting as part of its waste minimisation remit and an awareness raising programme to increase the quality and quantity of waste delivered to centralised composting facilities as part of its new organics programme.
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