And, recycling rates in the area have risen to 49.36% from 45.6%, missed collections have fallen by 12% and complaints are down 48%, as the Kent-based authority recovers from the “disruption” to the service in 2021.
The statistics were laid out in a report which went before the borough council’s Community and Environment Scrutiny Select Committee yesterday (14 June), which assessed the performance of the local authority’s waste contract delivered by Urbaser and identified areas for improvement. It was written by the council’s director of street scene, leisure and technical services.
The data included within the report is for the period from April 2022 to March 2023, with the exception for those relating to recycling and composting performance, where the data for April 2022 to December 2022 is the most recent audited data available.
The document noted that while the amount of residual waste from kerbside collections has decreased from 20,180 tonnes to 18,894 tonnes between April to December 2021 and the same period in 2022, the total amount of waste collected between within the same time frame increased by 1% in 2022, rising to 37,489.
Performance
The document looked at a range of performance indicators, including the completion of scheduled collections, the number of reported missed collections as well as formal complaints related to refuse and recycling and more, comparing them to the previous year.
The report recorded an improvement with regards to the percentage of rounds completed on scheduled collection day. This increased by around 9%, from 88.7% between April 2021 and March 2022 to 97.8% between April 2022 and March 2023.
The document also highlighted that the total number of reported missed collections fell by 12% between April 2022 and March 2023 in comparison with the same period the previous year, from 14,954 to 13,217. On a similar note, the number of formal complaints related to refuse and recycling for the same period decreased by nearly 50%, from 525 in 2021/22 to 274 in 2022/23.
When it comes to fly-tipping, the local authority saw a marginal increase of 2% in the total number of reported fly-tipping incidents from 819 in 2021/22 to 836 in 2022/23. The number of bulky collections rose by 29% year-on year, from 2,838 to 3,660 in 2022/23.
Recycling
As mentioned previously, with recycling and refuse the local authority was drawing on the latest available data from between April to December 2022 and comparing them to the same period in 2021.
According to this data, the council’s recycling performance for total waste recycled or composted has improved, rising from 45.46% between April 2021 to December 2021 to 49.36% for the same period in 2022. This was then broken down into waste recycled and waste composted. The former fell slightly from 21.94% to 21.49%, while the percentage of waste composted rose to 27.87% between April to December 2022 from 23.52% in the same months of 2021.
The document then looked at data from kerbside collections separately. These saw 16,815 tonnes of recycling collected the second half of 2021 compared to 18,504 tonnes in 2022, up by 10%. The amount of collected food waste has, however, dropped by 23% from 2,640 to 2,033 tonnes. The amount of garden waste collected between April and December 2022 rose by 39.3%, increasing to 8,416 tonnes from 6,061 tonnes collected between April and December 2021.
Service
Now that collections have “generally stabilised”, the council said Urbaser have been instructed to “refocus on some of the other aspects of the contracted services” such as street cleansing, litter & dog waste bins.
Tonbridge and Malling borough council recorded a 44.9% recycling rate in 2021/22 and is part of the Kent Resource Partnership between the area’s 12 district and borough councils and Kent county council.
The councils act as waste collection authorities, with Kent county council in charge of the disposal of the collected waste.
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