A seismic shift for Swindon’s waste and recycling collections

From 27 November, the way we throw things away in the borough of Swindon will evolve. It’s the biggest change to how our waste gets collected in 15 years and will see a whole new fleet of refuse vehicles released onto the town’s roads.

- From Monday 27 November there will be weekly bin collections. One week for recycling and one week for domestic waste.

- Food waste collections will be taken on a weekly basis with Swindonian households receiving a new large 23 litre outdoor ‘caddy’ as well as a smaller five litre ‘caddy’ to put in the kitchen to empty into the outdoor one when necessary.

- Every Swindon household will receive a new 70 litre weighted bag for plastic and metal recycling. This is to go out in whichever week the recycling is collected. If it fills up, households can put any extra in another weighted container (not a clear plastic bin bag) and it will be collected.

- The two other existing recycling bins should be sorted into paper and card in one and glass in the other.

- A letter will be going out to every Swindon household in the next few weeks explaining the changes and letting you know what the collection days will be.

 

It’s mind-boggling when you think about it.

There are nearly 100,000 households in Swindon and the borough council is tasked with getting rid of every single bit of rubbish thrown away by all of them.

That’s a hell of a lot of rubbish and for the council it’s a huge Herculean task.

Over the summer, with driver shortages, you could see that the council team in charge of the bin collections got to the point where they simply weren’t coping. Entire collections were missed or delayed much to the chagrin of the Swindon population.

In a local area, there are three things that seem to get townsfolk ready with the pitchforks. Potholes, parking and bin collections.

And Swindon Borough Council, and its newly installed Labour administration, were definitely feeling the heat when it came to their waste and recycling collections - at least for a few weeks until it all calmed down and they were able to catch up.

So, you might understand why some people would be cynical about the newly announced massive shake-up to the collections.

With all massive undertakings there are bound to be a few teething problems.

I do predict that there will be some who simply don’t understand the changes (they’re all pretty common-sensical but not everybody has common sense), or don’t receive the right bins or weighted bags, or put their bins out on the wrong days, or somehow miss all of the ways that the council are trying to inundate the town with the information, or have their collections missed for some reason or another, or simply don’t care and just chuck everything in their general waste bin, or simply don’t have room for yet another bin.

There definitely will be problems.

If you live in flats for instance, these changes aren’t for you as communal bins will be dealt with in a different way. It’s for houses.

But one thing that has been pretty impressive is that to carry out this undertaking, Swindon Borough Council has invested £6 million in a brand spanking new fleet of refuse vehicles.

Rob Brown, the Head of End to End Waste Services at Swindon Borough Council, said: “A lot of the problems that we’ve been facing with our collections is that our fleet was at the end of its life and had lots of maintenance problems, so we would have had to replace the fleet anyway.

“These new lorries will be rolled out as part of this new service being introduced in November and one of the good things about them is that it will actually mean less collections. Beforehand we collected plastics separately so it would mean three different stops at households - plastics, recycling and general waste. But the new lorries are able to compartmentalise on the vehicles themselves all the different types of recycling including food waste, which is sorted even on the domestic waste collection vehicles, so there will only need to be two collections.”

According to the council, the rollout of the new system is costing about £800,000, to include the new bins and the letters going out to each household.

SBC’s Cabinet Member for the Environment and Transport, Chris Watts, said: “This is a scheme that has been in the planning stages for the past few years under the previous administration and it should make our entire waste collection services that much more efficient.

“Obviously, with everything, there is a cost to these things but this is necessary for us as a borough to be at the forefront of fighting climate change.”

Currently only about 40% of Swindon’s waste is recycled, with the rest heading for incineration in Oxfordshire, Avonmouth or Lakeside. The national average is now about 50%. It is hoped that the changes will push Swindon’s recycling rate up to 50% or even 60%.

Rob Brown added: “Councils in Wales are at the forefront of this with their rates at around 60% or 70%, but we are hopeful this will give us that push in the right direction.

“Food waste is generally quite heavy and bulky so households will definitely see a difference in what they are chucking into their main domestic waste wheelie bin. I think a lot of people will also be able to see how much food they are actually chucking away as well, meaning that households could end up buying less to provide less waste.

“The weighted bags might seem to some households a tiny bit small but they are actually quite sizeable and we would recommend crushing down your aluminium and plastics as much as possible. They are made to be crushed down.

“As time goes on, we should be seeing less and less waste anyway especially with supermarkets now on board with providing less packaging.”

Currently, the council uses several companies to deal with their recycling with paper and cardboard as well as the plastics going to local firms for recycling.

The food waste will be taken down to a company in Warminster where it will be going through a process of anaerobic digestion; this is where bacteria break down the waste in the absence of oxygen to provide fuel that is then used to go straight into the national grid, with any leftover being used as slurry for local farmers’ fields.

For the council, if everything goes right, this could actually provide a £1.2 million dividend as they are able to sell the waste for this process.

Cllr Watts said: “We know this is a huge undertaking and, like all change, it will take some getting used to.

“The team have had a difficult time recently but through their hard work they got through it and I have every confidence that they will make this work.”

• Don’t use the new containers just yet – residents will receive a letter with an exact date on when to start using them (their new collection day) ahead of 27 Nov

• Residents will be able to collect a second blue weighted bag, for free if they need one, from a core library but only once the council have finished the bulk of the deliveries

• The council is still busy delivering so residents are not to worry if they haven’t received the new containers just yet. They will receive them before anything changes. If they think they’ve been missed they will be able to report a missed collection later this month (more information will be in the letter mentioned above)

• Any further information or FAQs can be found at - https://www.swindon.gov.uk/recyclefaqs