Wokingham to review charged green waste service

Wokingham council is to review its new charged for green waste collection service after just ten per cent of eligible households in the borough signed up.

The local authority will be looking at the service as part of a wider review of changes to its waste and recycling collectionsintroduced bycontractor Veolia on April 2. But, the council has insisted that the principal of charging is sound.

Under the service change, Woking moved from providing a free garden waste collection service for around 80% of residents using hessian bags to a paid for service open to all households. Residents can either pay 60-a-year for a brown wheeled garden waste bin collection or can buy compost sacks at 1 each.

However, just 6,400 households have signed up for the wheeled bins out of 64,000 eligible households so far, with a further 3,000 buying compost sacks. The council has also received numerous complaints.

Angus Ross, the councils executive member for environment, told letsrecycle.com: We will be reviewing the green waste collection service as part of a wider review of the service changes. We will definitely be looking at the take up rate but we are relatively happy with the rate so far.

We have had some complaints and there were some initial concerns because of the costs.

Cllr Ross said that any changes the council made would need to be decided before next April and the start of the next financial year.

Sound

Despite this, Cllr Ross said the service still needed time to bed in and that he stood by the principle of charging.

He said: I believe the principle of what we have done is perfectly sound. The people that are most concerned are those with large gardens but why should people in flats pay for people with gardens?

There are lots of people composting and we provide them with a good rate for home composting bins.

As well as introducing charges for green waste collection in April, Wokingham also moved from a fortnightly to a weekly recycling collection service. It retained its weekly service for residual waste but residents are limited to 80 blue bags a year (see letsrecycle.com story). The changes are expected to save the council 1 million a year, but have been hit by a few teething problems, such as the delivery of a range of differently-sized blue bags.