The new regulations, due to come into affect on May 1 2003, place restrictions on the composting of kitchen and catering waste. As a response to the foot-and-mouth crisis, waste from the preparation of food will have to be processed on enclosed composting sites.
Up until April 2003, Daventry district council ran a ‘brown bin’ kerbside collection of compostables, which included kitchen waste such as teabags, vegetable peelings and stale bread, although meat products were not collected.
The council, one of the best recycling and composting councils in England, is now having to tell residents not to put anything in their brown bins but garden waste and cardboard. This is because like many other councils in the UK, it has no access to enclosed composting facilities.
Judy Gregory, director of environmental services at Daventry said: “This is a frustrating set-back in terms of our efforts to encourage residents to actively recycle and compost waste.”
With the help of its brown bin collection, Daventry has a recycling and composting rate of 44%. This is ahead of its short term targets and well on the way to the 2020 target of 50% instigated by Northamptonshire's Joint Waste Management Strategy.
The council is considering looking into new facilities to cope with the new regulations, but in the mean time can only tell householders to avoid kitchen waste.
“This decision has not gone down well with our residents or with officers, as we have spent the best part of five years encouraging residents to recycle their kitchen organics,” explained Sue Reed, lead officer of Daventry’s waste management team. “Residents cannot understand how composting their potato peelings is linked to foot-and-mouth!”
Home composting
As environment minister Michael Meacher stressed earlier this week (see letsrecycle.com story), the Animal By-products Order should not affect home composting.
Cambridgeshire county council is initiating a 4,000 promotion scheme this month, offering cut-price compost bins and ready-made compost for householders.
Mark Shelton, recycling officer for Cambridgeshire county council, said: “We all know that we need to reduce the amount of rubbish we throw away – composting is a really easy way for people to make a real difference. Up to 30% of the rubbish thrown away could be composted. We hope that by offering compost bins and compost at less than the usual price we can encourage people to get composting.”
For 2002-03, Cambridgeshire had a recycling rate of 23% and has a 2003-04 target of 33%. The county's performance will be helped by a grant from the DEFRA 140 million fund to for a county-wide kerbside collections of green waste by the end of 2003-04.
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