The service, which is being rolled out over the next four weeks, will also see a new weekly food waste collection, enabling households to recycle uncooked and leftover food such as meat, fish, bones and vegetable peelings.
According to the council, this will help reduce smells from the residual waste bin, as food currently makes up a third of residual waste by weight. The council therefore estimates that weekly food waste collections will help increase the recycling rate from 34.5% to 45% by March 2017.
Meanwhile, recyclable waste – which is collected from households in 240 litre green and blue wheeled bins (green for plastics, cans, tins, foil and glass, and blue for paper and card) – moves from a fortnightly to a three weekly service.
And, currently collected every fortnight, collections of residual waste will now also be collected every three weeks.
The plans were approved back in July, with the council needing to save £37 million over the next two years (see letsrecycle.com story).
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According to the council “doing nothing is not an option” and it is hoped that the new waste and recycling service will “help protect other essential public services”.
Rochdale borough councillor Jacqui Beswick, cabinet member for environment, said: “Every tonne of waste collected from the dark green bins, costs taxpayers £306.62. With the council needing to make large savings over the next two years, we need to do things differently. It is five times cheaper to recycle food waste than it is to simply throw it away in our dark green bins. Taking food waste out of the rubbish bin and recycling into compost, locally in the North West, will help us achieve the £1 million saving.”
Neil Maver, waste and recycling manager at the council: “We’ve made this as easy as possible for households by offering weekly food waste collections, delivering new silver kitchen caddies and free compostable bags. Households without brown recycling bins are also being provided with a free brown street caddy which is the size of small pedal bin. The small brown street caddy is a practical size to help residents recycle their food waste.
“Our recycling advisors are still out and about across the borough, to ensure people have information and support where they need it.”
The new service starts today (October 20) in Middleton, before spreading to the rest of the borough over the next four weeks, with all residents receiving 23-litre food caddies and an information pack with their new bin collection calendar.
Bury
In moving to a three weekly residual waste collection service, Rochdale follows its neighbour Bury, which became the first local authority in England to collect residual waste once every three weeks when it made the switch in October 2014.
In March the Bury reported that monitoring the first five months of the system had seen around 2,450 tonnes less residual waste collected than compared to the same period 12 months earlier, with recycling rates having jumped by around 5% for some months.
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