In 2008, Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire district councils jointly tendered for a fortnightly recycling service that could boost their respective recycling rates. The bid that the councils ended up choosing was from Biffa, which suggested that the authorities move away from a weekly, unlimited residual waste collection with weekly collections of recycling boxes to an alternate weekly collection of residual waste (in a 180- litre wheelie bin) and co-mingled recycling (in a 240-litre wheelie bin – with the option to place excess recycling next to the bin) alongside weekly food waste collections. The system has seen recycling in both councils almost double (to over 65 per cent) since 2009, with Vale of White Horse claiming the top spot in Defra’s recycling league table, as well as in Resource’s residual waste arisings league table (with 114.2 kilogrammes of residual per capita – see issue 79). Pete Dickson (pictured, far right), Commercial Director at Biffa Municipal, tells Resource that there are three main reasons for the success of the service: “Firstly, this service makes recycling as easy as possible. Without fail, where we switched from a multi-box or bag service to a wheeled bin, people presented between 20 and 200 per cent more recyclables for recycling. Secondly, the magnitude of the change also had an effect. Vale of White Horse used to have unlimited weekly residual waste collections and a recycling box service – so there was no incentive to recycle in the previous service. But with a complete overhaul, there’s better communication, and people have to learn a whole new system – so are naturally more engaged. Thirdly, there has been simple and effective communication, and an ongoing investment in that communication. Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire have invested substantially in a communications consultancy and that’s really helped engage people.” Touching on the quality debate, Dickson says that there is some ‘confusion’ from separate sort advocates regarding the quality of recyclate from materials recovery facilities (MRFs). He explains: “There’s been a lot of talk about paper quality for example, but actually, the confusion is often over grades of paper, not quality. “For commercial reasons, the majority of our fibre (paper and card) is sold as a mixed paper commodity, because that’s where the consumer-driven demand is. Mixed paper is a lower grade of material than newsprint – but we still need to meet the same reprocessor specifications, whether it be from separate or co-mingled collections. So I believe it’s a grading issue, not a quality one.” He does concede, however, that closed-loop glass recycling has been a challenge, as glass separated at MRFs is often used as an aggregate substitute (rather than remelting for bottle making). However, Biffa has been investing in new technology at its Edmonton plant that sees glass go for use in more niche remelt applications, such as water filtration media or fibre glass use. It’s this end use of the materials that Dickson says is important, stating: “If an authority has or is moving toward a co-mingled collection, it’s important that the authority uses a modern MRF that’s producing high capture rates within its operation and is actually selling that material for recycling. The necessity test in terms of recyclate quality comes before the TEEP test – so councils have got to take care with where their materials are going, and ensure that they’re going for recycling.” The councils told Resource that they have already carried out a TEEP assessment on the waste service and say they “do not have any plans to change [the] current, successful collection service”.

Find out more about the separate collections vs. co-mingled collections debate, or take a look at our case study on separate collections.