South Gloucestershire invests 1 million in waste plant

The council said it expected that half of all waste brought there by residents could be recycled.

Work has been in progress on the “Sort It” centre for six months, during which time the council's contractor SITA has kept the site open at weekends.

SITA engineer Scott Dunbar, who designed the new facility and was in charge of project management, said the old buildings had “come to the end of their life”.

The layout has been changed to make it easier for cars to get onto the site and to eliminate queues that previously sometimes stretched back onto main roads.

Alternate weekly
The reopening of the Mangotsfield centre has coincided with South Gloucestershire's switch to a two-bin alternate weekly system for domestic waste collections.

Residents are being provided with a green bin for garden waste and cardboard, and a black bin for non-recyclable waste, which will be collected on alternate weeks.

Green boxes for dry recyclables will be emptied at the same time as the green wheeled bins.

The scheme began in January and will be completed by the summer in phases of 12,000 homes designed around collection vehicles routes.
South Gloucestershire covers a mixed suburban and rural area to the north of Bristol.

Some 44 tonnes of green waste and cardboard was collected from the new green wheeled bins in their first week, the council said, and there had been a 25% increase in the quantity of dry recyclables collected.
In 2002/03 South Gloucestershire recycled 12% of its waste and composted 1.98%.

Hostility
A council spokeswoman said the majority of residents had accepted the new collection system, but the switch to fortnightly collection of residual waste had inevitably attracted some hostility.

She said: “It is the same as with any other council that does this and there are complaints, but most people manage well. I've been amazed at the amount of cardboard there was in my own bin that I can now recycle.”

South Gloucestershire offers a free waste audit service in which staff will call by appointment and go through residents' rubbish advising on what could be recycled.