The revelation from the Labour-controlled council came after a Leeds Liberal Democrat councillor blamed the failure on the council’s unwillingness to consider any alternative to fortnightly residual waste collections.
The council had bid for 13 million to pay for weekly collections of food waste across the city to support its move to an alternate weekly collection of residual waste and commingled dry recyclables. At present, Leeds collects residual waste weekly and recyclables every 28 days. It also operates a fortnightly collection of green waste over the summer months.
The city council still intends to roll out the alternate weekly service in 2013. However, following the unsuccessful bid Cllr Mark Dobson, executive member for environment, explained that food waste services will remain limited to some small pilot trial areas in Rothwell, Kippax and Methley.
Cllr Dobson said that while he was disappointed by the Department for Communities and Local Governments (DCLG) decision, he would be undeterred and would look to expand the scheme at a later date. He said: The DCLG money, as nice as it would have been, it came with extra strings attached which would have been untenable.
He added: We have still got aspirations to expand our food waste programme but at the moment we have got to make the books balance. Without the money from the DCLG we cant make a wide spread of food waste collections achievable.
The Labour-run council was one of 33 local authorities whose bids were unsuccessful in winning money from the DCLG. In total, 85 councils received money for 90 projects (see letsrecycle.com story) – the majority of which supported weekly waste collections.
Naive
The councils approach to the bid has been criticised by Liberal Democrat Councillor Stewart Golton who accused the council of being nave.
Cllr Golton said: Almost three quarters of councils who bid were successful, so the fact Leeds wasnt gives a pretty damning account of the quality of our scheme. The council was nave to think that a fund to pay for weekly black bin collections could be used to help pay for them to go fortnightly. I have said all along that this wasnt a serious scheme and it looked like it was drawn up in a rush with an expectation of failure in mind.
He claimed that if the council had “paid attention” to what the government was looking for it would have had a good chance of getting a share of the money.
Self-defeating
Responding to Cllr Goltons comments, Cllr Dobson said Leeds had considered the criteria fully before submitting its bid with a twist and was not naive in its approach.
He added that keeping weekly residual waste collections would be self-defeating and against the councils aspirations to increase recycling and divert waste from landfill. The council achieved a reuse, recycling and composting rate of 37.4% in 2011/12.
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Cllr Dobson said: We wanted to try and go to black and green alternate collections and running alongside that we wanted to do a weekly food waste collection. If we had asked the government to give us the money for food waste on the understanding that we would keep weekly black it would have been self-defeating. On the one hand we wanted to implement the food waste collections but on the other it would have been like tying one hand behind our backs in terms of recycling.
It [food waste collections] would have been a very significant string to our bow. Not only do I want to divert waste from landfill I have good aspirations for Leeds for anaerobic digestions. With the tonnage we could have gone to the market and say look at what we are collecting.
Cllr Dobson added he also has aspirations to get the councils fleet running on biofuels within the next ten years.
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