Those managing flats in Oxford may be penalised if they do not provide ‘at least’ the same number of recycling bins as residual waste bins, the city council has warned.

Revisions to Oxford City Council’s Recycling Collection Policy for Flats and Houses of Multiple Occupation, first announced in 2012, outlined that all Residential Domestic Agents (RDA) for flats (such as landlords or agents) should provide equal or greater numbers of recycling bins to residual waste bins.

According to the council, this could have been achieved by removing some of the existing green landfill bins, repurposing landfill bins to recycling bins, or by buying more blue recycling bins.

The policy, which only applies to sites that pay council tax or are exempt (around 15,000 flats), aims to see ‘at least as much material is put out for recycling as is put out for landfill’, thus increasing the area’s recycling rate – which currently sits around 46 per cent – and help achieve the EU’s target of recycling 50 per cent of waste by 2020.

Change details

Previously, RDAs just had to provide flat dwellers with blue co-mingled recycling bins for dry recyclables (including paper; glass; plastic; card; and metal).

However, under the updated policy, RDAs needed to undertake surveys to ensure that there was not a greater number of residual waste bins than recycling bins and that residents were using the bins correctly (in April 2014, the council launched a new initiative to also see all flats have separate food waste recycling bins by 2016).

The council has said that it would ‘seek to collect no greater quantity of waste from domestic refuse bins than from domestic recycling bins’ and that it would not collect landfill waste or recycling material unless these were ‘presented in a bin meeting the council's specification’.

As such, RDAs were warned that they might need to pay for additional waste to be disposed of and potentially purchase new bins (either 360-litre (small); 770-litre (medium); or metal only 1100-litre (large) containers).

Landlords and individuals could be penalised

A grace period of one year was given to RDAs to allow them time to set measures in place to comply with this, and the council has said that ‘most landlords and agents have now started to implement the change within their properties’.

However, it added that it would take enforcement action against RDAs as a last resort where necessary.

A council spokesperson said: “Should the need arise we do have the capacity to take enforcement action as a last resort under section 92a of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and we will work in conjunction with the Community Response Team. But so far we have not needed to resort to enforcement action.”

Further to this, the council outlined that if the correct bins have been provided and excess waste is still being presented outside of the containers, the council could service notices to the occupants of the property (under Section 46 of the EPA), which, if left unheeded ‘without reasonable excuse’, could result in fines of up to £1,000.

Find out more about the flat recycling policy in Oxford.