Starting yesterday (August 13), the council is encouraging the public to comment on plans for dealing with the authority's municipal waste, which include reducing the council's dependence on energy recovery, minimising the waste sent to landfill and increasing the recycling rate from 26% to 50%.
Writing in the draft's foreword, councillor Hazel Noonan, cabinet member for city services, said: “This strategy is both ambitious and challenging and I commend it to the people of Coventry as a framework for improving waste management performance and reducing the city's waste.”
Energy recovery
One of the main focuses of the draft document is on reducing the amount of waste sent to the council's energy-from-waste facility, which is owned and managed by local firm Coventry and Solihull Waste and Disposal Company and currently deals with 64% of Coventry's 180,000 tonnes of annual household waste.
The council intends to decrease the amount of waste it sends to the facility by 2020 through putting more efforts into waste prevention, reuse and recycling, and make consideration for a new waste management infrastructure within the West Midlands as the facility has been running for over 30 years.
In the proposed framework, the council said: “A corner stone of the waste strategy is that by 2020 the city will be recycling and composting more of its household waste than it treats through energy recovery.”
Proposals to replace the existing recovery centre when it reaches the end of its operational life have been discussed as part of a Coventry collaboration with Warwickshire county council and Solihull council under a joint bid for PFI support called ‘Project Transform'.
In documentation for the bid, which has had its Expression of Interest approved by Defra, the councils' forecast capital expenditure of £197 million for a new energy-from-waste facility capable of treating 350,000 tonnes of residual waste built on the site of Coventry's existing facility.
Proposed
The waste strategy will look to build on improvements made in recycling by the city since it adopted a ‘Waste Philosophy' in 2003, and includes a waste hierarchy, which places waste prevention as the most pressing objective above re-use, recycling and composting, energy recovery and disposal.
The adoption of a new waste hierarchy would see reuse of materials given prominence, with the strategy acknowledging that the majority of this work is done through third sector – charity and non-profit – organisations.
However, the council does outline plans to introduce a free goods exchange called ‘SWAP Days', support a Freecycle programme, introduce bulky waste collections and introduce dedicated reuse areas to household waste and recycling centres.
Waste
Coventry currently landfills 21,000 tonnes of waste a year, which the council claims is relatively low compared to other authorities. In the draft summary, the council states: “As a local authority we landfill amongst the lowest amount of waste in the country, and this is an enviable position we wish to protect.”
As part of its drive to hit a 40% recycling rate by 2015 and 50% by 2020, the draft shows the intention of the council to introduce comingled kerbside collections for paper, glass, cans, cardboard and plastic across the city with homes being issued a 140 litre recycling bin.
In addition, the council would perform a feasibility study for food collection and look to improve the recycling and composting performance of public waste and recycling facilities.
Councillor Kevin Foster, deputy leader of the city council, said: “The plans being unveiled set out a practical and realistic approach to ensuring we can increase recycling, whilst ensuring we can also effectively dispose of the waste we create.”
Following the consultation, a revised version of Coventry's waste strategy will be considered by members of the council at around the turn of the year, with the precise date depending upon the number of consultation responses and the extent to which these are incorporated into the final strategy.
Register for free to comment