Halton Borough Council has announced that it will end its recycling reward scheme from 1 November, because of budget cuts within the council.

The council scheme, set up in 2009 in partnership with environmental reward scheme RecycleBank, gave registered residents RecycleBank points depending on their share of the amount recycled in the area. Points could then be exchanged online for discounts from online retailers and free magazine subscriptions.

Greenredeem took over the scheme in 2013, with a similar system giving residents discounts on restaurants, breaks and consumer goods. Residents could accumulate up to £135 in rewards each year.

Halton operates a co-mingled recycling service, with dry recyclables placed in a blue bin, and garden and residual waste taken in separate bins. The blue bins of residents who registered for the scheme were fitted with tags that weighed the amount of waste in the bin.

In the time that the scheme has been running, the Merseyside borough’s recycling rate has risen from 28 per cent in 2008/09 to 39 per cent in 2013/14, still five percentage points lower than the national average. Continued cuts to the council’s budget meant that the decision was made to end the scheme.

Initial cost estimates published by the council in 2010 suggested that the scheme would cost £144,000 per year to run.

Residents will still be able to spend points that they have already earned, but will not receive any more from 1 November.

Front line services taking priority

Cllr Stef Nelson, Executive Board Member for Environmental Services, said: “It is unfortunate that we will be ceasing this service to our residents, but the continued and significant cuts to our funding by central government [mean] that we need to make really hard choices about the services we provide.

“The scale of the cuts means that we are having to take increasingly difficult decisions to help achieve the level of financial savings required to balance our budgets.

“Spending less money for waste disposal means that we will have more money to spend on important front-line services that may have been at risk of ceasing or reducing as a result of the ongoing cuts to our funding.

“We are currently looking at alternative ways of rewarding our residents for their recycling efforts.”

Rob Crumbie, Communications Director at Greenredeem said: “Having worked in partnership with Halton Borough Council to increase their recycling rate three times faster than the national average in the last five years, we're naturally disappointed that the partnership has now ended.

“However, Greenredeem believe that the scheme in Halton has proved that a rewards-based communications platform can improve recycling rates, and we are looking forward to working with many other local authorities in the future.”

Government support of ‘unproven’ incentive schemes

The government has supported recycling incentive schemes through funding from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). In March, DCLG revealed 46 projects had been granted a total of £5 million to assist local reward schemes, and had added a further £6.1 to the funding pot ‘due to its popularity’.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) had previously administered the Household Reward and Recognition Scheme between 2011 and 2014, providing £2 million to local authority programmes.

However, a February 2014 study undertaken by Eunomia Research & Consulting on behalf of Servo that investigated the impacts and potential benefits of recycling incentives found that the value for money presented by such schemes is ‘unproven’ and could in some cases cost more than the benefits they deliver.

An interim report from Brook Lyndhurst in January 2014 into Defra’s Household Reward and Recognition Fund, meanwhile, appears to have come to a similar conclusion, finding that improvements in recycling and reuse tend to be linked to ‘better services and promotion rather than being attributable directly to rewards’.