In December 2022, the authority announced plans to trial the weekly collection of recyclables from households in the 2023/24 financial year. At the time, the council was run by an independent after no party had overall control.
After the Liberal Democrats won the 2023 election, councillors sitting on the Environment Policy Development Group earlier this week has now halted this trial while it awaits clarity from central government on consistency legislation and it has the chance to review how other aspects of the service are performing.
The council said this will also save it £30,000. If the service was to proceed with the roll out of weekly recycling on a permanent basis “there would be substantial costs of circa £1.4m,” the report stated.
‘Sense’
The report approved by the authority on Tuesday (15 August) explained: “Given the government is potentially about to announce national changes to how waste and recycling is carried out… it makes sense to postpone any pilot of the weekly recycling scheme until two conditions are met.
“Firstly that we have the detail of how future collections as mandated by central government will be made and funded and secondly, that the council has had the opportunity to fully evaluate the implementation of the Bin-it 123 scheme, including the ceasing of side waste collection, in order to establish the upper limits of what can be achieved by the current scheme.”
Campaign
The council also switched to three-weekly collections in October 2022 as part of the ‘Bin-it 123 scheme’ in October.
The purpose of this scheme was to increase the level of recycling and reduce the level of residual black bin collections, which in turn reduces the waste to be collected.
In the report, it was said that recycling performance for the months of April and May compared to the same months in 2022 has gone up between 4 and 5 percentage points. “This represented an increase or improvement in recycling figures of approximately 8% to 9%,” the report added.
Despite cancelling plans for weekly recycling collections and side waste, the council said it will “continue to raise education and awareness of the Bin-it 123 scheme with residents to further increase our recycling rate and reduce
the residual waste put out for collection”.
Representing an estimated population of more than 80,000, Mid Devon district council had a household waste recycling rate of 53.7% in the 2021/22 financial year.
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