Residents are recycling more and sending less to landfill

From July last year to February this year, 16,000 households in the Harrogate district have saved the public purse over £50,000 in landfill tax savings alone.

They were the first households in the district to move to the new wheeled bin alternate weekly service and this landfill tax has been saved as overall, waste sent to be buried has reduced by 6.5 per cent and recycling of paper, glass and cans (including card and plastic bottles for residents on the new service) has risen by nearly seven per cent earning Harrogate Borough Council an extra £40K income helping to offset the cost of the waste collection service.

As the service is rolled out across the district it is anticipated that further benefits will be realised.

These improvements are exactly what the council’s Waste and Environmental Services Team hoped to see and they offer a big thank you to these households and to all residents who are improving their recycling.

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Councillor Phil Ireland, the council’s Cabinet Member for the Environment, has also offered his thanks.

Councillor Phil Ireland said:  

These figures are really encouraging especially as homes in first phase of the new service cover just 23 per cent of the district.  We are now recycling 36 per cent of our household waste and our target by 2014 is over 40 per cent.

The team is now working on the second phase with a further 10,000 properties moving to the new collection service from 13 May this year.  We hope to have the whole district included by September this year, apart from a small number of properties not suitable for the new scheme.

Letters will be sent to the next 10,000 homes starting week beginning 18 March 2013 to explain when their wheelie bins will arrive and to give them full details of the new service.

 Councillor Phil Ireland said:  

We have made a number of improvements to the service.

We will be operating a Bank Holiday catch up service for both household waste and recycling, and residents can now recycle plastic bottles and card, such as milk bottles, cereal boxes and greetings cards.

Although we hope to eventually be able to include other types of plastic such as yoghurt pots and food trays, we are not in a position to do that at this time.

It is hoped that improvements in the UK reprocessing operations will allow for the inclusion of other plastics in the not too distant future.   The council also isn’t in a position to take hard cardboard.  But it does value residents making the best use of the Household Waste Recycling Centres operated by the County Council which can take large cardboard boxes and other material not collected from the kerbside.

Full details of the centres – located in Harrogate at Penny Pot Lane and Wetherby Road and in Ripon on Dallamires Crescent – can be found at www.northyorks.gov.uk

Residents in the Harrogate district can check their refuse and recycling collection days from the My Area button on the home page at www.harrogate.gov.uk