It will involve setting up a community involvement group representing a cross-section of interests from parish councils to the business community and from youth groups to environmental and voluntary groups.
As part of the process the council has produced its first newsletter 'Rubbish to Resource' for residents, detailing its work for the next three years on reducing the 40,000 tonnes of waste produced in West Sussex.
The waste reduction is part of a 25-year contract with Viridor (see letsrecycle.com story), which has made the waste management company responsible for running the county's 11 civic amenity sites. The aim is to increase the county's current 20% recycling rate to 45% by 2015.
Under the contract, millions of pounds are set to be spent on improving recycling facilities, including a new recovery plant (MRF). And from this September the council plans to give away 50,000 digester systems for householders to dispose of their food and garden waste themselves.
New contract
But from 2007, the council will be letting a Materials Resource Management contract to also deal with the county's residual waste.
Steve Waight, West Sussex cabinet member for strategic planning and environment said: “We will be consulting very extensively in the build-up to this contract and hope that as many people as possible will take part in the debate.
“We are fast running out of landfill space and in any event new limits are coming into force on the amount of biodegradable waste that can be disposed of by this method.
“Local authorities can even be fined if they exceed permitted landfilling levels, so we have to look at new ways of dealing with rubbish and we are anxious for it to be treated as a resource instead of a problem.”
Mr Waight added that residents have already been told incineration has effectively been ruled out by the county council before 2015 and after that, it would only be a last resort. “There are other methods such as biological treatment and technology is changing all the time,” he said.
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