Fife reports ‘low’ contamination as four-weekly trial continues

The Scottish council began the year-long trial in September 2015. The trial applies to 2,000 households in the areas of Thornton and Stenton, with officers monitoring the effect of a reduction in residual waste collection frequency from fortnightly to four-weekly.

Some concerns by residents unhappy at the potential for a permanent four-weekly roll out across Fife have been documented in a council officers’ report ahead of a meeting of the authority’s Glenrothes Area Committee on Wednesday (8 June), where councillors will be offered an update on the progress of the trial.

Report

According to the report, officers have recorded 284 incidents of contamination of recycling bins across the 2,000 homes to have been moved to the four-weekly schedule. This has led to home visits by recycling advisers, which according to the council has prevented further incidents of contamination in the ‘majority’ of households.

However, the report also outlines a summary of feedback received from residents, which revealed that some residents have reported to have been ‘struggling’ on the four-weekly trial, while others have claimed to have been ‘unhappy’ at the potential for a further roll-out of the service.

Further details of these complaints have not been made available in the report, which claims that only a small number of residents have filed a concern.

The officers’ report also claims that trial areas have seen a boost in the overall amount of plastic, cans, paper and cardboard collected from households in the Thornton and Stenton areas since the scheme started.

However, as in the council’s last report on the trial, overall details of tonnages have yet to be revealed.

The report noted: “As reported in the last update it won’t be possible to give definitive figures of the amount that landfill and recycling has changed until the trial is complete. However the trend reported in the last update of an increase in recycling and decrease in landfill is still being observed across both trials.”

Savings

Councillor John Wincott, who sits on the Glenrothes area committee, said rolling the scheme out across the area could save the council £1 million in disposal costs by 2020.

He said: “It is still early days, but we have seen an increase in recycling rates and low rates of contamination amongst our waste so far. The trial’s success so far wouldn’t have been possible without the effort of residents and our team.

“We were finding under the previous system that the recycling bins were often full or over flowing.

“If we rolled the scheme out across Fife then we could potentially save £1 million on landfill tax, because people would become more aware of recycling – and we wouldn’t be sending items to landfill that doesn’t need to go there.”

Fife recorded a 53.7% recycling rate in 2014.