The council has recently been rolling out a number of recycling initiatives. To build on these, a sustainable communities overview and scrutiny panel has been set up to look into waste minimisation schemes to further reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill.
The panel met between October and December 2005 and its report and recommendations have now been agreed. Recommendations have been made across a wide spectrum of waste management services, and the council's waste management department is now looking at suggestions made by the committee.
Suggestions include switching the kerbside scheme to an alternate weekly scheme, awareness raising, charging for bulky waste, limiting black bag waste in non-wheeled bin areas and the construction of two additional civic amenity sites in the north of city.
Suggestions
The scrutiny committee believes that switching to alternate weekly collections would not only be an incentive to recycle more, but it would also reduce the cost of collection. It added that bulky waste collection is a “special” service and therefore should not be provided free of charge.
Mark Turner, waste disposal manager, told letsrecycle.com that the waste minimisation proposals would be presented to councillors over the next six months.
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He said: “Some of the suggestions will need more detail than other, so we will be going to councillors with several ideas at a time. We need to establish how operationally and financially legitimate each possibility is. We estimate that costing one or two of the waste reduction plans could take several months, so we expect to have everything looked at by the summer time.”
Mr Turner added that Plymouth would not be rushing into any decisions because some of the possible strategies put forward would be aspirational rather than beneficial in the long term.
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