As part of its CROWN (Composting and Recycling Our Waste Now) service the council already collects green waste and cardboard in a wheeled bin as well as paper, cans and foil in a blue box every alternate week to residual waste.
The plastics trial will cover just over 1,000 households in Willingdon, East Sussex, but if it proves successful, plastics collections could be rolled out across all properties in the CROWN scheme.
Councillor Nigel Coltman, leader of Wealden district council, said: “If this trial shows that a plastics collection service is both practical and affordable the Council will consider expanding plastic collections to the remaining CROWN areas, some 37,000 households.”
Compaction
The council recently took delivery of three new Twin Pack kerbside vehicles from Dennis Eagle. The compaction vehicles are segregated into two compartments for kerbside sorting of the blue box recyclables. The larger compartment will take paper and the smaller will take cans, foil and, in the trial area, plastics.
Mike Pashler, head of direct services in the council, explained that the compaction feature of the new vehicles makes it relatively cheap to add plastics to CROWN. “Compaction makes a big difference on completion of the rounds; just by reducing the volume of waste we are collecting,” he said.
“The cost of taking out plastics with cans should not increase on collections,” Mr Pashler added, “it is something we can add to the scheme without excessive costs.”
The plastics collected will be sorted with those from Wealden's eight bring sites at Lewes district council's materials recycling facility where the bottles are hand-sorted by colour and polymer before being baled prior to sale.
Wealden council recycled and composted 24.7% of household waste in 2002-03 and Mr Pashler said that it is looking at a recycling rate of around 31% for 2003-04, exceeding the target of 24% set by the government.
Subscribe for free