We hope everyone had a great time at the recent LARAC Conference and Awards, we certainly did.
It was incredibly valuable catching up with friends, colleagues and customers across the Local Authority recycling sector to help refine our collective approach to the opportunities and challenges we face in the coming months and years.
Some of you may have attended one of the Food Waste workshops presented by our Public Sector Lead, Mark Barnfield alongside Ian Upstone, Waste Resource Manager at Cherwell District Council. These sessions provided a good platform for open, honest, and balanced discussions on the real-life experiences of transitioning to separate food waste collections from a collection authority and treatment provider perspective. We have reflected on those discussions and thought it would be useful to detail our key learnings.
Key challenges that Cherwell encountered
- The excessive lead times of food waste collection vehicles meant Cherwell had to start the service with hire vehicles.
- The additional costs (capital and operational) to Collection Authorities of introducing the new service.
- The cost per tonne of food waste collection compared to other collected waste streams is more expensive from a collections perspective.
Issue Mitigation
- Very early planning will help to mitigate procurement and supply chain issues.
- As Cherwell evidenced, charging for garden waste collections when transitioning from mixed organics to separate food and garden waste collections can offset some of that additional collection cost burden.
- Treatment costs of Anaerobic Digestion, (AD) are significantly lower than Landfill, Energy from waste or IVC. In a two tier authority, working with the WDA can potentially unlock some of that system benefit.
- Driving up food waste capture will reduce the cost of collection per tonne.
Key considerations:
- System design is critical to maximise recycling performance. Look to reduce residual waste containment capacity (collection frequency and residual waste container volume).
- Effective communication is important from the outset.
Concluding Thoughts
In accordance with the waste hierarchy, AD is the best environmental treatment option for separately collected food waste from a cost and environmental perspective, generating renewable energy and returning valuable nutrients to the land, in the form of a nutrient rich organic fertiliser.
Cherwell have evidenced the system benefits of separate food waste collections with early tangible reductions in the volume of residual waste by 7% and an increased recycling rate from 55% to 60%.
For those that haven’t transitioned yet, we agree it is essential that we get clarity from DEFRA on consistent collections timescales, TEEP and indeed new burdens funding. There is however no harm in planning for that change now.
If you would like to discuss the introduction of separate food waste collections, please contact Rachael Griffin, in our Public Sector team: rachael.griffin@stgreenpower.co.uk.
