Brighton & Hove City Council has agreed to replace the weekly recycling collection service in the city centre with communal recycling bins.

Proposals for the change were unanimously agreed by the Environment, Transport and Sustainability Committee last week (9 July) in a bid to increase city centre recycling rates and save more than £500,000 over the next six years.

According to the council, many city centre householders are unable to recycle correctly due to a number of reasons, including a lack of storage space; problems have led to increased levels of recycling contamination.

To tackle this, and help reach the collection authority’s bid to increase recycling rates to 50 per cent by 2020, the council installed several communal street bins for household waste in 2009. It is a smaller version of these communal street bins that the council now proposes to replace the current recycling box system in the city centre.

Trial details

The proposals come following a year-long trial in 26 streets in Brunswick and Adelaide, which saw recycling rates increase by 70 per cent (from 12.5 to 21 per cent) between 2 April 2012 and 2 April 2013 (in total, the city council recycled 28 per cent of its waste in the year 2011/12 – rates for 2012/13 have not yet been released).

Under the trial, residents were asked to take their usual black-box mixed recyclables (cans, cardboard, paper, plastic bottles) and glass to communal wheelie bins (each serving around 40 householders) for recycling.

A survey sent to residents after the trial found that the communal system was preferred over the household recycling box scheme by 73 per cent of residents.

This was followed by a six-week consultation between March and May 2013, which saw over 30,000 questionnaires sent to city centre residents asking them whether they would be in support of changing from the kerbside collection system to a communal recycling system. Of the 4,649 responses received, 80 per cent were found to be in favour, with 64 per cent agreeing with the proposed site of the communal recycling bins (mainly car parking spaces).

The introduction of the communal recycling bins will see the loss of around 272 parking spaces across the city (1.3 per cent).

A map of the proposed communal bin areas can be found online.

Service roll out

As part of the new scheme, recycling boxes will be collected from city centre householders ‘in the autumn’, with around 700 communal bins being rolled out in stages between October 2013 and March 2014. Around 32,000 residents will be affected by the change in service, excepting city centre residents who receive assisted collections.

The service will be financed through the £840,000 fund the council received from Eric Pickles’s Weekly Collection Support Scheme. The council has said that the scheme could save around £516,000 over six years because it uses mechanised loading of vehicles and fewer staff (however, the council notes that there will be no compulsory redundancies). Currently, the council’s waste and recycling is collected by council-employed staff and managed by Veolia Environmental Services at its Hollingdean materials recovery facility.

The bins will be emptied ‘whenever required’ – expected to be around three times a week – with residents encouraged to recycle ‘little and often’.

‘Very strong public support’

Speaking of the service, Chair of the Environment, Transport and Sustainability Committee Councillor Pete West said: “Our pilot of this new system of communal recycling scheme has already shown it to be a very good way to get increased recycling, cleaner streets and less damage to the environment.

“Our extensive public consultation has now revealed very strong public support for rolling out these new bins over an even wider area, and we know they will help save money and be more convenient than black boxes. We aim to pass part of the savings on to charities and local community groups to help encourage residents to do even more recycling.”

Alongside the communal scheme, the council will also be introducing an incentive scheme to encourage residents to recycle more and reduce the amount of residual waste they produce. For every tonne of waste that is reduced, either through waste minimisation or recycling, the council will pay £15 to a fund that local charities can bid in to. The scheme will reportedly be funded by ‘reduced disposal costs’.

Concerns over service and conditions

The news follows growing concern over Brighton and Hove’s low recycling rate compared to other authorities in Sussex and indeed the rest of the country. The council has also recently been embroiled in a dispute with refuse and recycling workers who went on strike for seven days in June to protest plans to reduce their take-home pay.

Councils have increasingly been changing the way they operate waste and recycling collections, with Derby City Council announcing earlier this month that it is consulting with householders and local Neighbourhood Boards on proposals to end recycling collections in four areas of the city.

Read more about Brighton & Hove City Council's recycling changes.