Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140
- 159)
TUESDAY 22 MAY 2007
CLLR GARY
PORTER, MR
GARY ALDERSON,
MS NICOLA
BEACH AND
MR IAN
DAVIES
Q140 Chair: That therefore presumably
limited you to what you put in the van. You could not subdivide
the van, could you?
Mr Alderson: If I could explain
that. For the householder on their residual collection week it
is standard refuse collection vehicles. On the recycling week
we use twin-back, or split-back vehicles. The vehicle is split
longitudinally into 70% for dry recyclables and 30% for the green
waste. So, that one vehicle collects two streams of waste on that
week. We have a set of vehicles: we have five main vehicles which
do the residential waste collection, and they do half the households
one week and half the households the next. We now have six vehicles
which collect the recyclables and the green waste; again, half
and half.
Q141 Chair: Was the main impetus
in doing it that way to limit the amount of residual waste you
were taking away to try and encourage people to reduce their waste?
Mr Alderson: There were two principal
benefits at the time: there was the limit, the minimisation push
for waste but there was also clearly the cost, because we saved,
in effect, five or six refuse vehicles and crews. That is the
saving for the authority. Although my authority is the fifteenth
lowest council taxing district council, we were subject to council
tax capping two financial years ago. I am certain if we had not
gone down this route it would have been an even more serious and
difficult situation than we found ourselves in at the time.
Q142 John Cummings: My questions
are directly to Mr Ian Davies. The Committee have been told that
alternate weekly collection is the way to rapidly increase recycling
and diversion from landfill. Is this method feasible in an urban
metropolitan area such as Hammersmith & Fulham?
Mr Davies: Personally I think
that it is not particularly feasible. The issues on collection
methods are going to be largely governed by housing stock. In
a borough like Hammersmith & Fulham we have about 40% of the
properties which are flats; a lot of them are high density, with
very little space between flats to actually install refuse. Even
the houses we have in the borough have very small front gardens
and are not likely to have sufficient space to store wheelie bins.
As a consequence we are still using the black sacks as a means
of collection method. Given the density of the housing, I think
alternate weekly collection in an urban environment is going to
be very difficult to achieve and roll out.
Q143 John Cummings: Do you have any
specific problems you encounter in an urbanised area with alternate
weekly collections?
Mr Davies: The borough is obviously
quite different in its make-up. There are some areas of the borough
that have large houses but, even so, have relatively small gardens.
It has been described as "a borough of patios and window
boxes", which is one of the reasons we have a problem with
green waste targets. We also have areas which are very highly
dense in terms of numbers of flats. We have lots of flats above
shops, so they have very small storage areas. Even with a collection
one day a week, we still have problems with refuse being put out
on the wrong days; we still have problems with people fly-tipping.
One of the problems we also have is, obviously there is quite
a big turnover of residents in the borough, it is quite difficult
to try and get the message across about when the collection day
is. In fact we actually have more than one collection a week in
the higher density areas. We are just in the process of market-testing
our waste collection services. The intention is that we will actually
increase the level of refuse collections in some areas of the
borough; but we will also, at the same time, increase the level
of recycling collections in those areas as well to try and balance
it up.
Q144 John Cummings: Do you have any
particular problems in an area which has very high significant
levels of transient population, high concentrations of shared
accommodation such as flats or estates?
Mr Davies: As I say, it is very
difficult for people, firstly, in flats because they do not have
the storage area. If you are running a twin system, as we do,
you obviously need to have a storage area for your residual waste,
your non-refuse; and you also have to have a storage area for
your recycling materials. If you live in a one-bedroom flat or
a studio flat there simply is not room for you to do that. The
whole thing about recycling is that you have got to make it easy
for people to do. If it is easy for them to do then they will
actually do recycling, but if it is a chore, or if it poses particular
problems to them, they are going to be less inclined to do it.
To expect somebody to store waste in their property for up to
10 or 14 days while they are waiting for an alternate weekly collection
is simply not going to happen in an urban environment where you
have small properties. In terms of the turnover of people, it
is very difficult to keep people informed. You have obviously
got people whose first language is not English and that makes
it even harder to keep them informed. In terms of looking at recycling
and the way we have approached that, we have actually reached
probably a bit of a plateau in where we are in terms of recycling
levels. We have done lots of campaigns. We have worked with a
disposal authority, West Riverside Waste Authority, to link in
with national campaigns and link in with regional campaigns, and
we have also done an awful lot of door-stepping. Getting the message
across just in terms of recycling is difficult enough; getting
the message across in terms of "This is your collection day"
is also quite hard.
Q145 John Cummings: I understand
that you collect co-mingled rather than pre-sorted waste. What
are the advantages and disadvantages of collecting in this way?
Mr Davies: I think, for the setting
we are in, the co-mingled scheme is very effective. First, we
have harmonised it across four London boroughs, so it is ourselves,
Kensington and Chelsea, Wandsworth and Lambeth, all of whom use
the West Riverside Waste Authority as a disposal authority. As
I said earlier, if you want people to recycle, you need to make
it as simple as possible, and a co-mingled scheme is simple; they
do not have to think about it and everything goes into the same
sack, so that makes it quite easy from the resident's point of
view. We use that same system for businesses as well, so it is
a unified system across the borough. In terms of collection, it
makes it much faster. In a dense urban environment, there is lots
of traffic, and you cannot have a situation where a refuse vehicle
is parked in the street and they are sorting refuse into the back
of that vehicle and you have heavy levels of traffic. It makes
it very quick if it goes straight into the back of the vehicle.
As Cllr Porter said, there is no having to run back and replace
the bin, so it a much faster system. On disadvantages, for Hammersmith
& Fulham, for the borough we are in, I do not think there
are any major disadvantages of that system.
Q146 John Cummings: How lucky you
are!
Mr Davies: As I say, collection
methods are largely governed by the type of housing stock. There
are arguments that it would be nice to have a big bin system,
but people have not got the space to put these systems in place.
Q147 Chair: Do you have recycling
facilities around in the streets so that people actually have
a facility and they can just take stuff there anyway?
Mr Davies: Yes. One of the obvious
issues and problems we have is that we have a high number of flats,
many of which are above first-floor level, and it is very, very
difficult (if not impossible) to do a door-to-door collection
service. We have tried to do that, and we are doing some piloting
work at the moment. I know a number of London boroughs have done
it, but what they have found so far is that the yield is relatively
low and the costs are very, very high. What we tend to focus on
is near-door schemes; so we have got a number of what we call
Smart Banks, which is basically a large recycling bag, and we
have about 350 of those around the borough, which covers over
95% of flats in the area. On some sites we have up to about 20
different Smart Banks within a particular housing estate to try
and make that work. We also have paper banks outside tube stations,
and we try and put the Smart Banks in areas where people can bring
their waste and dispose of it, such as supermarkets and places
like that.
Q148 Chair: How frequently do you
empty those?
Mr Davies: There is no one frequency
of collection because they are basically serviced on the basis
of how often they need it. They have been very successful in raising
recycling rates in those types of high density sites.
Q149 Chair: On green waste, I know
you said you have patios and window boxes, but where does the
green waste go?
Mr Davies: The green waste is
composted and goes to West Riverside Waste Authority and they
have a contract and it then goes on for composting. Our recycling
rate is very, very low for green waste.
Q150 Chair: Is that exclusively people
taking it?
Mr Davies: No, it is a bring system.
We have just introduced a registration scheme. Prior to last year,
we had a service where we had green waste bags. They have to be
a particular type of bag—they have to be biodegradable—and
we put biodegradable bags into council buildings, libraries and
main community points and people would pick these bags up and
put their waste out for disposal. The service was not as effective
as it could be for various reasons, but mainly because we were
not collecting on the most effective day for residents—we
were collecting at weekends—and also because we did not
have a registration scheme and did not know where the waste was
being put out. We introduced a registration scheme this year and
we now know where people are who are registered and can actually
go straight to them and pick the refuse up. It has reduced the
number of vehicles we need to go out to the sites, and it has
reduced the carbon footprint of the service.
Q151 Martin Horwood: Are the green
waste bags then disposed of along with the green waste each time?
Mr Davies: Yes, because they are
biodegradable. Once you put the waste into them, they break down.
Q152 Martin Horwood: Each bag is
made and used once?
Mr Davies: Yes, but they are biodegradable.
Q153 Martin Horwood: That is not
very energy efficient, is it?
Mr Davies: What we are looking
for is a system whereby you remove the waste from the street and
put it into a vehicle. The alternative is to use bins, but when
you think about bins, again people have not got lots of storage
space for bins. We have also looked at doing composting. We have
not had a completely free composting service but we have a subsidised
service. There has not been a huge take-up on that, primarily
because people do not want a big composting bin in the handkerchief
of the garden! Coming back to your point, we offer this registration
service where people register and we go and pick their waste up.
Our recycling levels on green waste are only about 0.5% of our
totally recycling target. As a London authority, we would argue
that, when recycling levels are shown nationally, we are actually
penalised by the fact that we have not got a large amount of green
waste. If you look at our dry recycling target, we have got good
recycling levels.
Q154 Martin Horwood: Ms Beach, you
have quoted the examples in your submission of Braintree and Uttlesford
District Councils which have both moved to alternate weekly collection
of residual waste and have also achieved quite dramatic increases
in recycling rates. I just want to try and tease out how much
of that increase is due to the alternate weekly collection, because
there seem to be quite a lot of other things going on at the same
time: education; campaigns; the introduction of organic waste
collection and so on. How much of it is due to the alternate weekly
collection?
Ms Beach: If we look at Uttlesford,
who are the most recent example and introduced their scheme starting
in July 2006, they have not only achieved significant recycling,
they are looking at something like 50% plus as an outturn figure
for 2006-07 and they have also achieved significant waste minimisation.
I was interested in what the other witnesses were saying about
the introduction of wheeled bins and the impact of that. I think
Uttlesford is an example of where they switched from a sack collection
to a wheeled bin and not only have they achieved high recycling
but significant minimisation. Taking your point about whether
you can try and tease out the one cause of that, that is very
difficult because it would be very foolish for any authority to
instigate a change as significant as that and not have a good
communications programme with it. So I think it is a combination
of all of that. In my experience of working in other areas where
there are changes to collection systems, whether they are alternate
weekly or not—and I always think `alternate weekly"
is a slightly misleading phrase because it implies that the householder
is only actually visited every other week and that is not the
case; it is actually a weekly collection of waste and it is just
that not all the waste is taken away at once so that I think the
phrase the media have picked up on is quite misleading—where
they have done that, you have to have a good communications programme.
It is really a combination of all that.
Q155 Martin Horwood: Let us ask about
Uttlesford in particular—residents there have three different
bins of different sizes for the different wastes?
Ms Beach: Yes, they do.
Q156 Martin Horwood: These are all
wheelie bins, are they not?
Ms Beach: They changed from a
sack collection, which is actually a backdoor collection, so not
only was it a change of container and frequency, it was actually
a cultural shift of the refuse collectors previously going to
people's backdoor, whereas this time you had to bring the wheeled
bins to the kerbside. There is a major change there which needs
to be recognised. They have three wheeled bins: one is for the
weekly collection of food waste, which is the 140 litre size,
the smallest bin you can get that actually will physically lift—
Q157 Martin Horwood: It still has
wheels?
Ms Beach: Yes, it is the smallest
one that will actually lift on the back of a vehicle. There is
also a 180 litre wheeled bin for residual waste, the non-recyclable,
and a 240 litre wheeled bin for the recyclables, which are your
paper, cans, plastics and so on.
Q158 Martin Horwood: Where on earth
do people put them?
Ms Beach: I think in Uttlesford
there is very much mixed housing. Broadly speaking, there is storage
capacity there. Braintree is different. If you look at the mix
of Braintree housing, you have a mix of some town and some terraced
housing, some quite close-knit estates, and some blocks of flats.
Braintree showed flexibility, and again I think this is a key
factor, in introducing a collection frequency change. They showed
flexibility, and for those houses similar to the ones my colleagues
have mentioned which they do not think are suitable for that type
of frequency of collection or container, they will make those
collections more bespoke.
Q159 Martin Horwood: If someone has
a flat in Uttlesford—and I presume you have flats in Uttlesford—where
on earth do they put three wheelie bins?
Ms Beach: Uttlesford District
Council would not provide that level of service to them.
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