Decision details

      i.        Bracknell Forest Borough’s impact on Climate Change be reduced, through the introduction, from 5 October 2020, of a weekly food waste collection service

     ii.        a programme of communication be launched to maximise the participation of

residents and business to reuse and recycle their waste, minimising residual

waste going to landfill

    iii.        performance of the food waste collection service to be maximised and the refuse capacity is reduced by changing collection frequency to once every three weeks (from two weeks).

1.     DEFRA published their Resources and Waste Strategy in December 2018 and this was followed up with consultation on potential changes between February and May 2019. On 23 July DEFRA published an executive summary and government response to the consultations, food waste collection was addressed in this and DEFRA have said ‘We will be mandating weekly separate food waste collection’, their intention is to do this by 2023.

2.     Food collection should enable Bracknell Forest to achieve the Government target of 50% recycling by 2020 and move towards the much higher recycling rate of 65% by 2030 that DEFRA have set as their ambition in the Resources and Waste Strategy.

3.     Reducing the refuse collection frequency will improve the performance of a food waste service as well as increasing the use of the current recycling services compared to if the refuse service remained the same as currently.

4.     Reducing the refuse collection frequency will pay for the food collection service and generate a saving of £219k over the life of the contract.

5.     Recycling food waste would have a positive climate change impact that includes a potential reduction of almost 4,000 tonnes of landfill waste.

1.     Keep the waste collection service the same as now; without the addition of food collections. BFC would fail to meet DEFRAs requirement for having a weekly food waste collection service by 2023 and also fail to meet the national 50% recycling target. Failure to meet the 50% target could lead to fines from DEFRA.

2.     Add a weekly food collection to the existing service and make no other changes; this would cost in the region of £2.29million more than the current service over the remaining 7 years of the collection contract term.

3.     Add a weekly food collection to the existing service and downsize refuse bins from 240 to 180 litres; this would come at a high capital cost of £1.4m and ongoing revenue cost and have a negative climate change impact due to the need for a bin changeover.

None