The States of Guernsey, the parliament of the British Crown dependency, has removed seven small bring banks, with businesses being given the option to continue running a further 38, following the introduction of kerbside recycling.

Out of 57 sites, only the nine larger ‘supersites’ – Chouet, L'Eree, Longfrie, St Martin’s Manor Stores, Rohais (Waitrose), Salerie Corner, Vazon, and Cobo Village – which account for about 90 per cent of material collected, now remain open and in the local government purview.

Ten others have become glass-only sites, as jars and glass bottles are not collected through the kerbside scheme, which was introduced in March 2014.

Recycling officer Tina Norman-Ross said that the decision to close the brink banks came after the government found that use had fallen by as much as two-thirds since the introduction of kerbside recycling, and that closing the sites could save a minimum of £25,000 in the first year alone.

Norman-Ross said: "The majority of sites we were closing or looking to convert were little used, and in a lot of cases little known.

"The amount collected from them had also fallen sharply, and in most cases there were alternative facilities nearby. Maintaining them all was no longer sensible financially."

Variable charging to be introduced

The free interim kerbside recycling service was widely welcomed by residents when it was introduced last year, and reportedly led to a 10 per cent increase in recycling in the first three months of the service.

However, there were some teething problems with the collections, with around 2,500 bags of recycling not being collected due to contamination – largely through the inclusion of glass. Currently, glass is excluded from kerbside collections because of ‘issues associated with its collection’ (which can see broken glass contaminate other waste streams, such as paper, in co-mingled collections).

The States of Guernsey will be running trials over the coming year to see if these obstacles can be resolved, and thus allow glass to be part of the final variable charging scheme, which will be introduced next year.

Although no actual charges have yet been approved (as they depend on 2016 contract rates), the government has revealed that householders could need to pay:

• a fixed parish waste rate of around £68 to cover collection charges (based on evenly spreading the estimated £1.6 million needed to cover waste collections across the 23,800 property owners in Guernsey);
• a charge of between £1.50 and £2 per residual waste bag;
• a charge of 50 pence per recycling bag; and
• an additional charge if there is a shortfall in income from bag sales.

According to the local government, the charges will cover the cost of collecting, transferring, and processing recyclable material and residual waste and are needed to ‘minimise the long-term costs of dealing with waste’.

As such, the current charging system, where householders are charged depending on the size of their property, will be changed to incorporate the ‘fairer, polluter pays’ system, where those who produce the most residual waste pay the most.

Find out more about Guernsey’s variable charging scheme.