The Sterlingshire council began rolling out its existing system – the ‘3 bin’ scheme – which includes a blue bin for mixed dry recyclables, a brown bin for garden waste and a residual black bin, in February this year. Over 24,000 of the estimated 66,000 homes in the area are now on the scheme with more to be rolled out in October.
And, in order to ensure that even more households can recycle, from October, the Council will also be begin issuing up to 10,000 bins for flats and difficult to access properties.
Cllr David Alexander, convenor of the policy and resources committee at Falkirk said, “We are already making very good progress with the 3 bin initiative with a positive response from residents. We are delighted to be able to see kerbside collection move forward with another 10,000 properties contributing towards the effort to recycle.”
Project coordinator at the council’s waste management department, Robin Bard said that the council hoped to get the scheme out to as many of these properties as possible without delay. “We will start with around a thousand in October and see how it goes, but we hope to get them all out in a relatively short timescale”.
The bins will be available in three different sizes, which are smaller than the standard 240 litre bins, so that they can be stored inside the properties. The 25, 35 and 50 litre containers will be placed outside each door on bin day for the Council to collect.
Materials
The bin is intended to take card, cans, plastic bottles and textiles and will be collected weekly at first. Falkirk’s waste strategy officer, Callum Blackburn, explained “residents on the 3 bin scheme currently have an alternate collection of recyclables and residual waste, but because the bins for the flats are smaller, we decided that there should be a weekly collection to prevent overflow.”
Current collections at properties on the 3 bin scheme generate around 200 tonnes from the blue bins and around 160 tonnes from the brown bins, each month. Last year – 2002/03 – in Falkirk, approximately 90,000 tonnes of residual waste was landfilled.
In 2002/03 – the Council’s recycling rate was around 7%, but in June and July this year Mr Blackburn said Falkirk recycled 15% of its municipal solid waste. Its target for 2006 is 25% and he said he was confident that this could be met.
“We have just converted our both of our civic amenity sites to recycling centres, and we are expecting to collect more tonnage from these so we are think this will help us reach our target.”
Cllr Alexander agreed, but issued a message to encourage efforts to continue: “From the early figures we would appear to be on target of meeting national targets for recycling by the deadline of 2006, however we cannot become complacent.”
Falkirk is investing 1.8 million on kerbside collections, with a fund from Scottish Executive's Strategic Waste Fund.
Register for free to comment