The scheme will be delivered in five stages between October 2004 and February 2006, and will eventually reach 150,000 Somerset homes. The aim is to recover the 30-35% of kitchen and green waste that Somerset bins are thought to contain.
The new service will take all food waste including cooked and uncooked meat, and will collect from Taunton Deane, Mendip and South Somerset. The food waste will be collected at the same time as existing weekly collections of dry recyclables but will be sorted before going into the collection lorry to avoid contamination.
ECT has already had success with its organics and dry recyclables scheme in the district of Bath and North East Somerset and in four London boroughs (Organics West London). In London it has enabled residents to recycle up to 50% of their waste.
ECT's Managing Director Andy Bond, said: “Our experience shows that if people are going to recycle they need a method that makes is easy. In our view, this means offering the weekly collection of as many items as possible. Not just paper, glass and cans but the kitchen scraps – which together make up over half of the average bin.”
Caddy
Residents in Somerset will be given a small 7 litre kitchen caddy in which to collect food waste at home, along with a 25 litre bin outside their house, which they can use to transfer the food from the caddy to the bin, once it is full.
The collections will run alongside the new fortnightly garden waste collections and have been funded with the help of a 5 million grant from Defra's Waste Minimisation and Recycling Fund. Residual waste will also be collected fortnightly.
Both kitchen and green waste will be taken to Wyvern Waste in Somerset, where it will be composted and sold in bags to the public. The green waste will be composted in open windrows and the kitchen waste treated in an in-vessel composter.
Targets
Kitchen waste is a high proportion of what goes into the average rubbish bin and collecting it is likely to become more important for councils when the landfill allowance trading schemes come in this month.
Head of Waste Services & Sustainable Development at Somerset, Matthew Jones said: “Our analysis has shown that segregated collection of food waste is a key element in the package of services we must offer to residents if we are to meet these targets at an acceptable cost.”
Paul Chiplen, waste minimisation and campaigns officer at Somerset said “In 2003/04 our recycling rate was 27%. We have a target of 40% to reach by 2006 and with these new services we're confident that we're going to meet it.”
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