Todmorden News

95% Of Calderdale Households Are Recycling

Ninety-five per cent of households in Calderdale are using the Council’s new recycling service. Calderdale councillors will discuss a report next Wednesday (June 3), updating them on changes in the household waste collection service.

Members of the Council’s Health and Social Care Scrutiny Panel will be told that in other areas where it had introduced similar schemes, SITA UK, the Council’ s waste collection contractor, usually expected around 85 per cent of households to participate.

“In Calderdale, the actual rate has been 95 per cent. In addition to this, the high volume of plastics collected in the first cycle suggests that householders had been storing plastics for some time in anticipation of the new service,” says the report by Calderdale Council’s Head of Environmental Services, Peter Ramsdale.

The report goes on to highlight some of the difficulties encountered by householders in the first weeks of the new recycling service.

Problems encountered were:

• Initial survey of the number of containers needed was inaccurate. A programme for revisiting outstanding properties has now started and the problem is being resolved

• 66,000 white bags for recycling plastic bottles were delivered. However 22,000 failed to arrive. As a short term solution householders were told they could use other containers to dispose of bottles until the bags were delivered.

• The Assistance Scheme was not fully in place. In the short term this was resolved by removing wheeled bins from the households that had requested assistance and letting householders continue on the existing black sack back door collection service until their need for assistance could be assessed.

In addition, errors from the property survey meant that some households had been missed of the collection round sheets.

Coupled with the higher than expected participation in recycling, it meant that some collections were missed, resulting in a higher than expected number of calls to the Council ’s Contact Centre.

But Members will also be told that SITA and the Council are working hard to rectify the outstanding problems.

Extra call centre staff have been set on to deal with the increased volume of calls, while SITA have brought in additional crews, supervisors and administration staff ton deal with the increased workload.

The rate of missed collections is dropping day by day as crews become more familiar with the rounds. Householders are also getting used to the new service.

Scrutiny Members will decide how often they would like to receive progress reports on the new service.