FULL EMAIL ABOUT WHEELIE BIN CHANGES
Thank you for your email to all Neath Port Talbot Councillors concerning the
above to which I am responding as Cabinet Member with responsibility for
Waste Services.
Firstly, please be assured that no-one in the Council wishes to waste money or
make changes for no good reason.
The Council has been changing damaged bins with smaller bins, and providing
smaller bins to new properties for some time, and this is why as of April 2013,
of the 56,000 households in the County Borough on wheeled bin collections,
11,000 already had 140 litre bins. The estimated cost of £730,000, which has
been widely quoted in the Media, was the estimated total cost of converting the
remainder as identified in the public Waste Strategy Review report considered
by Members of the Council in April 2013. The estimate was based on a price at
the time of £16 per 140 litre wheelie bins. Members agreed bins would be
swapped over, as part of a comprehensive strategy to meet the statutory
recycling and composting requirements, as and when funding could be
identified.
For information, the current rates for wheelie bins are:
240 litre bin £17.40
140 litre bin £13.80
Therefore, under the Council’s current policy of 140 litre bins, the Council
saves £3.60 per bin when a new property needs to be served or when a
damaged bin needs to be replaced.
Also, under current prices, the figure quoted previously reduced to around
£620,000.
This calendar year the Council received £237,000 of ring fenced funding from
Welsh Government towards implementing its Waste Strategy of which £150,000
was spent on smaller wheelie bins. The Council has completed a survey on
recycling participation and the smaller bins are targeted at areas where the
most number of properties are not recycling.
Smaller wheelie bins are part of Welsh Governments preferred service provision
as identified in their published Collections Blueprint which is based on their
research findings that the smaller bins increase recycling and
composting. Indeed, the pilot area where the 140 litre bins were first changed
on block, which had the lowest percentage recycling participation at the time,
showed a clear significant improvement in participation. I enclose the data for
4 weeks before and four weeks after the change for your information.
If everyone maximised their recycling and composting, and all other things
being equal, then it would not be desirable to change perfectly good wheeled
bins for smaller ones. However, whilst the waste produced by the vast majority
of families can be accommodated within the smaller bins when they recycle and
compost, regrettably there is still a significant proportion of people who do not
recycle and need encouragement to do so. You may be aware that Welsh
Government has set in Law very challenging targets for recycling and
composting which the Council must strive to achieve, and similarly set fines in
law for failure to comply. The Welsh Government also provides significant grant
funding to help provide recycling services and achieve the targets. I can advise
you that despite the Council providing extensive recycling services, last year the
Council missed the current statutory target of 52% and was notified of a fine, if
it did not improve, of some £726,000 plus repayment of its Sustainable Waste
Grant funding towards recycling services, amounting effectively to a £3,000,000
fine. This would be an annual penalty, increasing in 2015/16 when the
statutory target increases from 52% to 58%. So you see the Council cannot
afford to sit back and let things happen ‘over a big period of time’ and I am sure
you would agree that spending such sums of money on fines really would be
money down the drain. The Council therefore needs to accelerate the
implementation of measures to increase recycling and composting, and we have
been, and continue to, seek funding opportunities to avoid the use of Council
funding on items such as bins. We do however, need to make progress and I
would note that recyclable material is cheaper to ‘dispose’ of than refuse so the
more recycling and composting the better.
The Council could, like many other Councils, adopt a position of no wheeled
bins and limit the number of sacks as others are doing. Whilst the associated
environmental consequences would no doubt be significant, and there would be
greater health and safety issues for our workforce, if all 64,600 households in
the Borough were on black sacks, and if they were provided with black sacks as
many others do, based on 2 rolls of 50 per year (2 bags per week) and a unit
price £0.03099, then the cost annually would be over £200,000 simply to
provide bags to throw away. In my opinion this would be a greater waste of
money and within 3 years would cover the entire cost of replacing the
remaining bins. Wheeled bins last for many years and therefore have to be a
better environmental and cost option in the medium to longer term.
I am pleased to say that the Council will exceed the statutory target in the
current year, given the measures being taken since the review of the Council’s
waste strategy last April.
I hope this information has gone some way to satisfy you that, within the
constraints faced, your Council has its charge payers interest foremost in mind
in the decisions that it takes.
Yours sincerely,
Councillor E.V. Latham