Council to start recycling before next season
The Council is to have co-mingled recycling in place by next season.
Photo by SCY TV
At the recent public meeting on St Mary's, Senior Manager for Infrastructure Craig Dryden said that the Authority is looking at keeping recycling as simple as possible by having residents place tins, paper and plastics in a single bag.
He said: "It looks like we'll do co-mingled, which is effectively where you get all your recyclables in a single clear bag and we collect them. That's probably the easiest way to go. The authorities who do co-mingled rather than separating out the waste streams have higher recycling rates as it's much easier for people to put things in a single bag."
Council Chief Executive Theo Leijser said: "It's easier for people to have one bin rather than four or five in terms of space", to which Craig added: "And it's easier from a vehicle viewpoint because effectively all you've got is a vehicle that needs to take your black bag (wet) waste and then just a compartment taking recyclables. You don't need separate compartments for plastic and tins, cardboard etc."
He explained that the Council will not be collecting glass because the 'bring' sites are working well and he is keen to keep glass on the islands.
"The more on-island solutions we can find, the more sustainable and cost effective it is. The cost of waste is all the double handling, transportation, getting it back to the mainland etc. If we can use glass as an aggregate, that's a really good way of using waste."
Of the Moorwell site, he said: "We've had some teething problems but we're almost there... The direction of travel is great. If you look at what that site looked like 18 months, two years, three years ago, I think people forget.
"Now all of our waste is dealt with compliantly and we've actually doubled the amount of waste we're managing [since 2014] and we've driven costs down as well."
He added: "We should in the next six months be in a much better position than we ever have been."