Ealing to charge for Garden Waste Collection

 

Ealing Council’s cabinet recently announced that it had agreed a return to a chargeable garden waste collection service for residents across the borough.

 

The fortnightly service, to be introduced next April, will be available for an annual subscription of £40. This entitles suscribers to a reusable hessian bag, a wheeled bin or 50 biodegradable sacks.

 

The Council hope that residents will be encouraged to compost at home,. It is offering a reduced price on compost bins (from £15). Garden waste can still be disposed of for free at the borough’s two re-use and recycle centres.

 

Obviously any reduction in recycling services is a backward step.  It has to be said though that this cut will impact on fewer people than reduction of any other waste collection service.  According to the Council, current garden waste participation in the Borough is approximately 25%. It can be assumed that virtually all households put out black bags at least occasionally and a good proportion recycle – over 40% use the food waste service, for instance.  Gardenless householders may well agree that people fortunate enough to have gardens should be asked to pay for their waste to be collected, especially if this means no reduction in other collections.

 

However, there is a possibility that far from encouraging home composting, the result will be an increase in fly-tipping.  Are the people who make these decisions gardeners themselves? Do they realise that there are occasionally things that even a keen composter would want to get rid of some other way: large quantities of shrub and hedge prunings, ivy, branches etc? If you haven’t got a shredder or space for industrial-sized compost bins, or a vehicle to take your garden waste to Greenford or Acton, what’s the alternative? Burning is not very friendly to your neighbours or to the environment. But shelling out forty quid to have your garden waste taken away three or four times a year isn’t a very attractive prospect. The option to buy twenty-five biodegradable sacks for £20 was put forward in a report to Cabinet but it’s not clear if this has been included in the agreed proposals.

 

Since the scheme will require properties to be registered for garden waste collections, there is no possibility of borrowing a reusable bag or sharing a pack of biodegradable sacks (unless of course you take your garden waste round to your friend’s house – there’s a thought).

 

The Council have also been looking at fortnightly collection of dry recyclables, co-mingled from a wheeled bin. The rationale is that this would provide greater capacity than the current system, and streets would be cleaner because of reduced spillage. Making it less complicated for people to recycle would improve recycling performance: it is anticipated that approximately 7,000 tonnes of waste (presumably per annum) would be diverted from the residual waste stream into recycling.

 

However, as a recent Horizon programme showed, there are serious doubts about the efficacy of co-mingling. In spite of sophisticated separation techniques, there is a danger that materials will be contaminated and end up in landfill after all, although they still count as recycled for Council targets.

 

This option, and that of fortnightly collection of residual waste from wheeled bins, have not been recommended at present, but may come under consideration again in the future.

 

A useful briefing by Friends of the Earth, Recycling Collections – source separated or commingled? is available from the FoE website  http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/recycling_collections.pdf