Council workers urge Swindon residents to wrap up food waste
More food waste will be collected in the borough.
More food waste in Swindon will be collected as Swindon Borough Council rolls out further measures including flats.
By the start of April next year, in law, the council will have to be ready to collect food waste from all its households, which means collecting from 10,000 plus flats in blocks that are not at the moment served.
Before the `flats trial started in June, food waste was collected from the kerbside from about 85 per cent of households.
People living in blocks with communal bin stores will be issued with a three-litre indoor caddy, and asked to empty that into a communal wheely bin labelled for food waste only.
They will not receive the five-litre outdoor caddy that those living in houses have.
To aid with this, the council workers driving around Swindon collecting kitchen scraps, leftovers and other food waste from blocks of flats have a request.
Especially as they shall soon be collecting from even more of the communal waste bins provided by those blocks.
Luke Murphy, who was one of the three-man crew collecting food waste from communal food waste bins as part of the borough council’s trial collecting kitchen waste from blocks of flats, said: “It’s better if people put the waste in a bag a biodegradable plastic bag, or a paper bag or wrapped in newspaper are the best things.
“If they put their kitchen waste in loose, then it can rot and go smelly, and there can be maggots and things and it can also clog up the lorry.”
Luke, along with his colleagues Simon Foote and Francisco Goes was driving around Swindon in a much smaller truck than the usual kerbside recycling collection trucks that most of us will have seen.
The small truck with a lid and a lift for a wheely bin is the only one the council has and is hired for the collection from blocks of flats trial, which started in June.
Luke added: “We can even collect cooking oil if it’s put in a plastic bottle.”
As the bags half-filled the communal wheely bin at a small block of flats, converted from offices, in Westlea, where emptied into the truck, Simon said: “We’ve got about 15 different stops this round, all over Swindon, we’ve been in Penhill, Walcot, Freshbrook and Toothill.”
The officer in charge of the pilot scheme collecting food waste from about 500 flats in larger block, Chris Smith said: “Since it started in June, we’ve collected about two tonnes extra from what we’d normally collect.”
That has saved the council taxpayer about £300, and the more food waste that is collected, the greater the savings to the council and its residents.
The council’s cabinet member for highways and the environment, Councillor Chris Watts, said: ”Every tonne we collect for recycling saves us at least £150.
“We are paid for the food waste which we send down to be turned into fertiliser and biogas, and it keeps waste out of the main waste stream, and we have to pay to have that taken away.”
Mr Smith said: “We’ll continue with the trial and we’re working out how many of the trucks we will need, but we are confident this will scale up.”