Dundee city council has unveiled plans to introduce a pilot household food waste collection scheme in September 2011 as it responds to Scottish Government proposals for all councils to collect the waste stream separately from 2013.
The councils housing, contract services and environment services committee is set to vote next week (May 9) on proposals to introduce a kerbside scheme on a trial basis for 2,400 of the citys households.
And, a report outlining the plans reveals that, if the one-year pilot scheme is deemed successful, it will be rolled out city-wide.
The report directly links the roll out to the Scottish Governments requirement for separate food waste collections which was included in its June 2010 Zero Waste Plan (see letsrecycle.com story). Draft regulations to bring this requirement into force were published in February 2011.
In order to prepare for this, the council plans to run the pilot covering a mix of housing types and areas, explaining that results from the pilot scheme will be used to help implement the optimum collection service city-wide.
Jimmy Black, convener of Dundee city council’s environment services committee, said: “With new regulations being introduced that require councils to collect food waste separately from 2013, we are once again ahead of the game.
“Around 30% of the total household waste is food, and up to now it has been expensive and technically difficult to find a way to recycle it, but now that it is possible to cost efficiently produce good quality compost exclusively from food waste we want to introduce this pilot scheme.
During the pilot, households in the trial areas will be provided with kitchen caddy, compostable caddy liners and a small container to be used to present food waste at the kerbside on collection day.
Cost
The estimated cost of containers, bags and publicity materials to be used for the pilot is 42,000, to be met from the waste management departments revenue and capital budgets.
Waste and recycling collections in Dundee are currently run in-house by the council, but a spokesman for the local authority told letsrecycle.com that further details of how the trial would fit within the existing service would not be made available until a decision was made on whether or not to introduce the pilot next week.
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Currently, the majority of Dundees households have their residual waste collected in a wheeled bin, while paper, card and Tetra Paks are collected in a blue wheeled bin once a month and a brown wheeled bin is used for garden waste.
Around 15,500 of the citys 72,000 households also use a green box to recycle cans, glass and mixed plastics.
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