In May, the council replaced its free wheeled bin green waste service collection with a reusable polypropylene sack service. The 110 litre sack is issued on a chargeable basis and will be collected fortnightly. The charge has been set at 20 per annum with an early bird discount of 5.
To encourage participation Test Valley also issued legal notices to ban green garden waste from residual bins. The council was successful in obtaining Defra funding in support of the change which enabled it to purchase new vehicles and employ staff to administer the change.
“There has been an astonishing response rate from residents,” said Phil Easton, business unit manager at Test Valley. “There are 46,000 properties in the district and to date nearly 9,000 households have joined, purchasing 12,000 sacks.”
“The demand was unexpected,” said Mr Easton. “And it has thus put a strain on the new system both administratively and operationally. For instance we did not realise how far empty sacks can blow in strong winds or how much grass people can put in them!”
“We have recognised early on that we will need to undertake a round reorganisation to balance workloads and we will need to consider carefully how we go about the licence renewal next year. We may also need to introduce some additional vehicles or loaders during the peak growing season.”
However, Mr Easton remains committed to the new scheme. “Of the green waste collected 300 tonnes has been of a suitable quality to be composted,” he said. The coming months would give a more accurate figure, he added, and said it would also be interesting to compare comparative weights of material delivered to civic amenity sites to see if Test Valley has reduced waste or just re-routed it.
“In Test Valley we are now convinced that attempting to limit green waste disposal is a more sustainable option than providing free unlimited green waste collections to boost recycling rates. However we are now realising how difficult that culture change is and are under no illusions as to how challenging reaching our 36% recycling target is going to be,” added Mr Easton.
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