The Berkshire council currently collects household rubbish which cannot be recycled or disposed of as food waste weekly in the blue bags.
Wokingham will consider reducing the number of bags it supplies or stopping supplying them entirely at a meeting this week (29 September), “in the face of unprecedented financial pressure.”
The local authority said that, due to inflation, the current funding allocated to waste can only pay for 54 bags per year. The council currently provides residents with 80 bags per year and says it would cost an additional £149,000 to continue to do so.
Stopping the supply altogether would save £463,000 but could “adversely affect recycling rates” and “this would cost the council in other, less obvious ways”, Wokingham claimed.
The authority is also considering moving collecting waste and recycling on alternate weeks and collecting food waste weekly.
The council reasoned that the current weekly collections will, with rising costs, “soon become unsustainable”. It added that change the collection frequency could save about £1 million per year and increase the recycling rate.
Wokingham will launch a consultation in the form of an online survey in early October to ask residents for their views on the potential changes, ahead of its current collections contract with Veolia ending in 2026.
‘Financial pressures’
Cllr Ian Shenton, Wokingham’s executive member for environment, sport and leisure, said: “The financial pressures on us are immense and we must find ways to re-work our services to ensure we continue to protect our most vulnerable residents.”
“Most people and most families should be able to make do with one blue bag of rubbish per week – use the food waste recycling collections, use the green waste collections, and recycle all your plastics, paper and card and tins. This is an easy saving for us to make.”
Food waste
The council already scrapped the free supply of single-use plastic food waste caddy liners earlier this summer in an effort to save money.
We must find ways to re-work our services to ensure we continue to protect our most vulnerable residents
- Cllr Ian Shenton, Wokingham’s executive member for environment, sport and leisure
The council has provided food waste caddy liners to household for the past two years to drive up participation in the recycling service. It added that, this year, the caddy liners cost about £75,000, “but were not included in the council’s budget.”
In July, council leader Cllr Clive Jones said: “The previous administration did not budget for these caddy liners, so to supply them we would have to take the money from something else.
“In this perilous time when costs are rising across the board, it just doesn’t make sense for us to continue to supply these, particularly as they are bad for the environment.”
The move was criticised by residents and councillors, who were concerned this step would lead to a drop in recycling rates amidst the local authority’s efforts to increase food waste recycling and achieve a recycling rate of 70% by 2030.
Wokingham
Representing an estimated population of more than 177,000, Wokingham borough council had a household waste recycling rate of 54.3% in the 2020/21 financial year.
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