Residents in Glasgow could be able to recycle their food waste from next year if funding for a £708,000 trial is approved by Zero Waste Scotland.
The council agreed last week (29 November) to apply for funding for a nine-month food waste collection trial, as part of the Waste (Scotland) Regulations requirement for all Scottish local authorities to have separate kerbside collections of household food waste by January 2016.
If the funding is approved, the council would roll out the service in June 2013 to 45,800 householders in the Polmadie and Dawsholm areas and expects to collect 1,248 tonnes of food waste from 32,000 kerbside properties, 300 tonnes from 1600 tenements/flats and 45 tonnes from 2,300 multistorey high rise properties.
Each property will be issued with a five-litre food caddy, with kerbside properties decanting waste into a 25-litre kerbside bin, flats using a 240-litre communal bin and multistorey properties, a 500-litre bin.
It is hoped that the trial would increase the Glasgow’s recycling rate by 0.6 per cent. If rolled out across the rest of the city, the council estimates that the overall recycling rate would increase by 4.9 per cent and see 11,870 tonnes of food waste diverted from landfill annually. However, a city-wide service would cost in the region of £5 million.
Councillor James Coleman, Executive Member for Sustainability and Transport at Glasgow City Council, said: “The introduction of this policy will assist in reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill and increase the amount of waste recycled. This will contribute to conserving resources and energy as less energy and resource is required when reprocessing recycled products as opposed to extracting raw materials.
"Recycling food waste will also assist in protecting the environment by reducing the requirement to extract, process and refine raw materials and reduce greenhouse gas.”
All food collected is expected to be treated at facilities already used by the council, such as Scottish Water’s Deerdykes or Johnstone anaerobic digestion facilities or Levenseat Waste Management’s in-vessel composting facility in Lanark.
If funding is approved, seven new jobs could be created for the in-house service.
Currently, most household food waste in Glasgow is sent out with general waste for landfilling, although from 2016, residual waste will be processed at Viridor’s gasification plant.
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