Stoke defends plans to change waste services

Plans to transform Stoke-on-Trents waste services, including a return to weekly collections of residual waste, will have a positive effect on the citys recycling rate, according to the councils portfolio holder for waste.

Councillor Andy Platt told letsrecycle.com that subject to the development of a viable business case during 2013, the council was planning to move from fortnightly to weekly collections of residual waste as well as develop a plant to remove recyclables from residual waste prior to incineration.

Cllr Platt claimed the measures, which would be introduced in 2014/15 and are still to be finalised, would help to increase Stokes recycling rate dramatically.

The Labour council is the only local authority which is planning to return to weekly collections of residual waste using money from Eric Pickles 250m Weekly Collection Support Scheme after being awarded 14,311,759 in November 2012.

Cllr Platt said: If the business case is successful then we will go back to weekly collections of residual waste.

He added that the scheme would help increase the councils recycling rate. In 2011/12, Stoke-on-Trents recycling rate was 38.5% but Cllr Platt said the city could do much better.

He said: The whole scheme, including weekly waste collections and the fuel preparation plant, will certainly have a positive effect on our recycling rate. Everything we can recycle will be recycled.

Funding

In November 2012, Stoke-on-Trent became one of 85 councils to receive a share of the money from the DCLG (see letsrecycle.com story).

The council is the only recipient to propose returning to weekly collections of residual waste. At present, the majority of households in the city have an alternate weekly collection service with dry recyclables collected in a blue wheeled bin, or green box, garden and food waste in a brown wheeled bin and residual waste in a grey wheeled bin, or black bag. However, 24,500 households remain on weekly collections. 88,231 could be affected by the changes.

“We are now inefficiently burning waste which is just ridiculous and recycling only 40%. We can do far better than that.”

– Cllr Andy Platt

The additional operational costs of moving to weekly waste collections are estimated to be over 2 million per annum. However the council said it is intended that these costs will be more than offset by the cost efficiencies and generating opportunities coming from the transformation of the waste collection and treatment processes.

The breakdown of how the council plans to use the 14 million is:

• 383,000 to develop the business case for weekly waste collections;
• 155,000 for the procurement of the fuel preparation plant;
• 9,000,000 to wholly or partially meet the capital cost of constructing the plant;
• 2,575,000 to fund additional vehicles to implement the weekly waste collections;
• 2,198,000 to meet the first year of operational costs of weekly waste collections.

The money will be given to the council on a yearly basis. Cllr Platt said if the business case proves to be not viable the council can call off the project at any time, without any financial implications. If this happens, collections and treatment of waste will remain as they are at present.

Facility

The proposed fuel preparation plant is hoped to increase the citys recycling rate and income opportunities by removing recyclables from the residual waste prior to incineration. The technology for the plant has yet to be decided but will be covered in the business plan.

At present, waste is sent directly to a combined heat and power (CHP) plant which will pass to the councils control in 2020. Cllr Platt said this method of treating the waste is inefficient.

He added: We are now inefficiently burning waste which is just ridiculous and recycling only 40%. We can do far better than that. There is value in the recyclates that can be used to fund other projects but also the waste can increase the efficiency of the CHP plant and use most of our waste in different ways. We are also working on things for food and garden waste to try and create energy from that.