Harborough aims for top of recycling league table

The Leicestershire local authority, which was ranked 11th in the household recycling league tables for England in 2008/09, with a 53.7% recycling and composting rate, said it hoped the new service, which is set to be rolled out to all its 34,000 households on May 4, would send its rate “through the roof”.

“The aim really is to become one of the best in the country, if not the best,” a spokesman for the council told letsrecycle.com yesterday (April 21), and added that, it was hoped that the new service would help Harborough to take its recycling rate “as high as we can go”.

The new service in being introduced by the council working with both its collection contractor, Spanish-owned waste company Focsa, and Leicestershire county council.

Under the scheme, the council hopes 3,500 tonnes of food waste will be separately collected every year, a figure it has based on other authorities with food collections, data from the Waste and Resources Action Programme and previous trials it has run.

Containers

The service will involve all households being provided with two containers – one 23 litre lockable food waste bin to be stored outside, and a smaller five litre caddy to be stored in the kitchen.

Residents are being asked to empty food scraps into the caddy and to then transfer it into the larger food waste container outside when they caddy is full. The container will then be collected from the kerbside weekly as part of householders' weekly kerbside recycling collections.

Food waste collected under the scheme will then be transported to Greenview Environmental's in-vessel composting facility at Corby in Northamptonshire, which was dubbed the “UK's most advanced” facility of its kind by the Suffolk-based company when it opened in July 2009 (see letsrecycle.com story).

Trials

The service has been introduced after what the council claimed were “highly successful” trials of food waste collections covering around 2,450 properties in the Lutterworth and Broughton Astley areas.

These trials, which began in October 2007 in Lutterworth and in Broughton Astley in April 2008, achieved between 60% and 70% participation rates and, between January and December 2009, saw 128.61 tonnes of food waste being diverted from landfill.

Commenting on the reasons behind introducing the new service for all its households, the council said in a statement: “We wanted to be the first council in the county to launch food waste collections because residents had told us that they wanted to recycle more, which is fantastic.

“We are sure this will have a positive impact both on the amount we recycle and the environment. We also hope it will help people think more about how much food they waste,” it added.