Select Committee on Communities and Local Government Committee Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1 - 19)

MONDAY 21 MAY 2007

MR STEPHEN DIDSBURY, AND MRS JUDITH TURNER

  Q1  Chair: I welcome you to the first oral evidence session in our inquiry on refuse collection. We have a lot of questions that we want to ask you, so could I ask you not to both answer every question unless you actually have something additional to add. We will try to keep the questions short and we would be grateful if you would try to keep the answers short as well so that we can pursue secondaries. Could I ask you each introduce yourselves?

  Mrs Turner: My name is Judith Turner. I am the Director of Waste Collection and Recycling for Veolia who operate the waste management services for Sheffield City Council. I previously worked for Sheffield City Council.

  Mr Didsbury: I am Stephen Didsbury. I am the Head of Waste and Street Services for Bexley Borough Council. I am in charge of both collection and disposal.

  Q2  Chair: Can I start off by asking about the alleged benefits of alternate weekly collections both for householders and for councils in comparison with the more traditional weekly collection, and in particular what evidence is there that AWC increases recycling levels?

  Mr Didsbury: From the beacon council's audit last year eight out of 10 of them—that is everybody apart from Sutton and Bexley—all did alternate week collections and all the authorities have gone to over 40% recycling with alternate week collection. Alternate week collection is a global name for quite a lot of different sorts of collection systems. Not all of them are one week refuse, one week recycling. Generally the common theme is that residual waste is fortnightly but not all of them do fortnightly recycling collections; some do weekly recycling collections. It is a name which is used generally but does not mean the same in every place.

  Q3  Chair: It always means that the residual waste is collected fortnightly.

  Mr Didsbury: Yes.

  Q4  Chair: What are the benefits to householders and to the council?

  Mrs Turner: The benefits to householders are that it actually provides them with the facilities to recycle waste at their home, to separate the waste at their home. Alternate week collections cannot exist without the storage capacity to enable people to actually recycle. It is not set in isolation and therefore it does give people an opportunity in their own locality to separate out their waste. In terms of the advantages for the local authority it helps them to achieve their recycling performance and there are a lot of drivers within both legislation and from a local perspective to do that.

  Q5  Chair: It would be theoretically possible to get householders to separate their waste into three or four different categories and collect every category weekly.

  Mr Didsbury: Some residents will recycle whatever hurdles you put in front of them. They go off to the recycling banks and things like that and they would be about 20%. There would be about 60% who, with education and communications, will recycle to some greater or lesser extent. Then there are about 20% who probably will not do it unless they have some way of being encouraged or forced into recycling. If you provide people with a service and give them good communications you will get quite a long way. My own authority is doing 40% and we collect refuse weekly.

  Q6  Chair: Is the point of AWC to force people to recycle who otherwise would not bother?

  Mr Didsbury: To encourage people to recycle is probably the best way of doing it, making it easier to recycle or at least as easy to recycle as to throw away.

  Q7  Chair: How does it make it easier for a householder to recycle by the fact that not everything is collected every week?

  Mr Didsbury: Because they are having to think about their waste. If they can just throw it away they do not have to think about it.

  Q8  Anne Main: On a practical basis—and speaking from a constituency with a lot of tiny terraced houses right on to the street—many people find the idea of having recycling delayed for whatever reason would actually discourage them because they do not want it hanging around for much longer. Can you not see that side of it?

  Mrs Turner: I think we ought to make the point about alternate weekly collection that it is an option for local authorities, but it is not a panacea for every local authority. There is not one single solution for every local authority in the country. AWC has been shown to illustrate that it can improve recycling where it is implemented successfully, but it is not the answer for every local authority. There are issues about houses in multiple occupation, there are flats and there are considerations for the type and the typography of the city. It cannot be said that alternate week collection is right for everyone. I think the CIWM have made it clear in their position statement that it provides a valuable option for those people who want to adopt alternate weekly collections but there will be some authorities that will choose not to.

  Q9  John Cummings: Is there a savings on cost?

  Mr Didsbury: Not in the short term. Generally when most people introduced alternate week collection they increased their recycling services because you cannot reduce your residual waste collection unless you give somebody somewhere to remove the waste to. You cannot just say that they have one box now and a wheelie bin, let us just collect the wheelie bin fortnightly because that just will not work. You have to increase your recycling services to give residents options to be able to take the waste out to their bins. In the long term, because of landfill tax going up, the whole idea is to move waste away from landfill so this is one way of reducing waste going to landfill or other residual waste treatments. Landfill tax is going up by £8 a tonne and in the long term it will save the disposal authority, but not necessarily the collection authority, money.

  Q10  Martin Horwood: I cannot see how that is right actually because although I do take what you are saying about the overall capacity not necessarily being reduced, you are basically moving from three visits a fortnight to two visits a fortnight where you have, as my authority does at the moment, recycling collected once a fortnight and residual waste collected every week. That is bound to be a cost saving.

  Mr Didsbury: Each authority is starting from different positions. Most authorities have now increased recycling.

  Martin Horwood: If every authority is different and everyone is using different systems, and even the pilots that you have talked about seem to be covering a multitude of different approaches, how confident are you on the reliability of these statistics you quote that AWC does actually increase recycling and it is not other factors locally that are affecting it?

  Chair: Just before you answer that, in answer to my question I think you said that the common factor of all AWCs was that the residual waste was only collected fortnightly and yet Mr Horwood's system appears to be the opposite so his does not count as AWC anyway.

  Q11  Martin Horwood: What I am saying is that if it moved to AWC we would be down to two collections a fortnight instead of the current three.

  Mrs Turner: In some respects that is hypothetical because your authority may also give you another container for another collection.

  Q12  Martin Horwood: Most people starting work on this say it is going to be unpopular, it is going to be unhealthy and it is going to be pretty unpleasant. I cannot think of many districts which would not have some housing where, as Anne has said, the design of the estate and the housing makes it pretty unpleasant to have waste sitting around for two weeks. Very few authorities are not going to have to make some different arrangements.

  Mrs Turner: There is an assumption in what you are saying that everybody will have the same and it will go across every authority or that within the authority everyone goes to alternate week collection. That clearly may not be the case for flats.

  Q13  Martin Horwood: Are you going to ask district councils to make a judgment call as to whose waste they collect weekly and whose waste they collect fortnightly?

  Mr Didsbury: That already happens with things like blocks of flats. The blocks of flats in my authority get collected from two or three times a week whereas houses only get collected from weekly because they do not have the facilities at the bottom of the chutes to empty them unless you empty them more regularly. You already have a differential collection service in most local authorities. Harrow is the only London borough at the moment which is doing alternate week collection of residual waste but it is collecting its food waste and garden waste weekly. Provided the residents put their food waste in their brown bag it will not be hanging around for two weeks. The only things hanging around for two weeks are basically items which will not degrade.

  Q14  Chair: What would your Institution regard as the components of residual waste which could safely be left around for a fortnight before being collected? What would you exclude from that residual waste?

  Mrs Turner: At the moment the CIWM position is that the residual waste can have a number of components in it and food waste can go in for alternate week collections on the basis that it is properly bagged. In our written statement I think we have made that point.

  Q15  Chair: Would that be your advice?

  Mrs Turner: That is our current position.

  Q16  Martin Horwood: That presupposes that everybody properly bags everything. There have even been suggestions that people ought to wash their bins in order to facilitate this, which is pretty optimistic really. Do you really think you can rely on everybody doing this and therefore even a minority of people not creating a public health risk for others?

  Mrs Turner: I think one very important thing has come out of issues around alternate week collection and that is how important communications are. Clearly you cannot introduce alternate week collections anywhere without having a good communication strategy and the most important point is that once you have introduced alternate week collections that communication strategy has to continue. We have to sustain the information flow and that will be about those perceived health risks as well. I think that is very evident by the last few months' media coverage.

  Q17  Mr Olner: It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with alternate week waste collection or residual waste or collecting recyclable waste is that everybody is doing it differently and nobody really knows what is happening.

  Mrs Turner: Local authorities have the choice in the way they implement their services. People are doing it differently.

  Q18  Mr Olner: That choice brings confusion. There is not one single message going out to householders as to what they can recycle, when they can recycle it and what they should be putting in the residual waste. For instance my own local authority does green waste—grass cuttings, pruning and stuff like that—but it will not do food because food contaminates it. There are different messages going out so I think it is essential that the local authorities through the LGA get some consistent messages going out. Perhaps you could answer directly the question whether you think alternate weekly collections is the only way for councils to cut the amount of waste going to landfill and incineration.

  Mrs Turner: No, I do not think it is the only way; I think it is an option for local authorities to consider and they do have to consider their own local solutions.

  Mr Didsbury: The other ways are good education so you can work in schools and work with the kids so they know that recycling is the correct thing to do. You can provide good communication, provide a good recycling scheme, and providing other things like food waste, composting and other items so that you are providing a wide range of services and you provide a wide range of promotions. You do not just have a leaflet that comes out once a year; you do advertising in papers, you do radio adverts, you do roadshows, you meet the public and keep reinforcing the message. You can divert a large amount of waste but that still leaves about 20 or 25% of the population who might need some further encouragements to recycle.

  Q19  Mr Olner: As your colleague said earlier, because of the differentials of collecting and the role of the authorities, the statistics are not very easy to confirm, are they? Do they actually mean anything at all?

  Mr Didsbury: St Edmundsbury has been doing this for five or six years. Wealden has been doing it for long periods of time. It is not something which has happened since last summer; this has been going for five or six years and if there had been a significant problem with the collections this would have been evident in the authorities that started first.


 
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