Wakefield Council has said it will not begin its new co-mingling service until summer, following delays to the delivery of equipment needed for the new service.

The council announced last year that it was to move from its dual-stream kerbside recycling service (co-mingled collections of dry recyclables in a wheelie bin, excepting paper and card, which is collected separately in recycling box) to a fully co-mingled service on 16 March 2015 (using just the wheelie bin).

The decision was made after council officers found that separate collections were neither economically nor environmentally practicable; they estimated that separate collections would annually cost the council £9.6 million and have the highest carbon emissions, mainly due to greater vehicle movement in the scenario they analysed.

However, the recycling change has now been postponed ‘until summer’ following a delay in delivery of ‘vital recycling equipment’. The sorting equipment was expected to be installed at the council’s new recycling facility in South Kirkby ahead of the recycling changes in March, but at the end of February, Wakefield’s waste contractor, Shanks Waste Management, informed the council that the equipment had been waylaid in North America after the ship it was travelling in became stuck in the frozen Hudson River.

Although Shanks had in place a contingency plan to take waste to another facility until the South Kirkby site could be ready, the sub-contractors informed the waste operators ‘at the last minute’ that this would no longer be possible.

As such, Wakefield Council wrote to residents at the beginning of March to inform them to ‘ignore’ previous correspondence about when the new service would start, and continue recycling in the dual-stream system until further notice. (However, the council did collect recyclables placed in the co-mingled wheelie bins for the first two weeks to ensure that residents’ recycling efforts were ‘not in vain’.)

Although the equipment has now been delivered to the South Kirkby site, it is still in the process of being installed. The council has stated that it has ‘no firm date’ as to when the new, fully co-mingled service will be rolled out, but said it expects it will be ‘in early summer’. The council added that it would notify residents about when the service will commence once it has an agreed date.

‘No alternative but to postpone the planned changes’

Councillor Maureen Cummings, cabinet member for the environment, said last month: “We are really sorry that we are having to ask people to disregard letters which have already been sent out, but this is due to factors beyond our control… This leaves us with no alternative but to postpone the planned changes to the district’s waste collections until later in the year.

“We appreciate that this will cause inconvenience and uncertainty for householders, but we are committed to delivering a better waste management and recycling service for all homes as soon as we possibly can.”

Peter Eglinton, Managing Director of Shanks Waste Management, apologised for any “inconvenience or confusion” the delay had caused, and assured residents that it would work to have the recycling site up and running ‘as soon as possible’. Shanks has reportedly paid for the costs of the delay.

Find out more about Wakefield Council’s decision to move to co-mingled collections, or read more about its investment in the South Kirkby materials recovery facility.