City recycling rates up!
Thank you for helping Plymouth’s alternate weekly collection get off to an encouraging start – that’s the message from the leader of the Council, Ian Bowyer.
New figures show that people across Plymouth are recycling more and throwing away less waste.
The city is trimming its waste line – throwing away nearly 12 kilos less per household – that’s almost two stone (48 pasties) less rubbish than they did over the same period last year.
An extra 319 tonnes of recyclables – that’s the equivalent weight of 12 rubbish trucks or 1,276,000 pasties. The amount of domestic waste reused, recycled or composted overall has increased by 549 tonnes.
The provisional figures for recycling/compost rate now stands at 38.62 per cent for the period of April to June. These figures are currently being verified and there will be some seasonal variation over the coming months, but we are on target for our predicted recycling rate increase.
Council Leader Ian Bowyer said: "In May 2016 we inherited a poor recycling rate of 32% from the previous Labour administration which is significantly below the average UK figure of 43%.
"The Conservative administration took the bold decision to move to an alternate weekly collection to encourage recycling as we wanted to improve Plymouth’s recycling rates and we wanted a cleaner and greener city.
"Clearly the latest provisional recycling rate of 38.62% has shown that this was the right decision and we will always do what is right for Plymouth.
"Thank-you to everyone who has helped us get this far. We know there is more to do, but this is a great start."
Councillor Mike Leaves, cabinet member for Street Scene and the Environment said: “There is no doubt this has been a huge project to change habits across an entire city. We knew there would be challenges in some areas which have had long-standing issues, but we have been tackling them. This is a very encouraging start.”
On 8 May 2017, the Council changed to alternate weekly collections, with recycling or green bin picked up one week and non- recycling in the brown bin picked up the following week.
Other interesting statistics from April to June
• The amount of rubbish collected in the brown bins has reduced by 1,810.07 tonnes – a drop of 11.9 per cent
• Overall the amount of domestic waste sent to the EFW has reduced by 1,311 tonnes – down 7.3 per cent
• Domestic rubbish that is not reused, recycled or composted has fallen by 11kgs per household to 138.7kgs
Chelson Meadow and Weston Mill Household Waste Recycling Centres received an extra 9,255 visits, compared to last year with residents taking their waste and recyclables which were being thrown away in the brown bins.
