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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