Little improvement in Peterborough’s recycling rates due to Covid

Aragon Direct Services (ADS) operates a fortnightly collection of residual and recycling waste from around 85,000 properties, with food waste being collected weekly.

Between April 2019 and September 2019, 39.84 per cent was recycled or composted.

For the same period in 2020, 40.71 per cent was recycled or composted, an increase of just 0.87 per cent over the year.

Addressing members of the Growth, Environment and Resources Scrutiny Committee at their online meeting (10 November), Richard Pearn, Head of Waste, Resources and Energy, said: “Current recycling rates compared to this point last financial year slightly up, but we recognise that with each 1 per cent that can be diverted into the correct recycling waste stream, this can save PCC circa £48,000.

“Where we have continual contamination issues, ADS have reinstated their officer who will visit the properties to offer education and advise on how they should be using their bins correctly.

“We are also working on other communications campaigns to try and increase participation in using the Food Waste service as it is recognised that both the black and green bins are still seeing food waste deposited in them.”

Cllr Heather Skibsted asked: “These figures are up by less than one per cent which doesn’t seem to me to be very much of an increase especially when this council declared in July a climate emergency.

“What is the council going to do about this because we pride ourselves on promoting Peterborough as the capital environmental city in the UK, yet we can’t seem to improve our recycling rate?”

Cllr Marco Cereste, Cabinet Minister, Waste, Street Scene and the Environment: “This is a very difficult issue to tackle because we as a council do everything that we possible can to encourage and facilitate recycling and as Richard says for every one per cent that we do recycle the council saves £48,000.

“Therefore, it’s not just a question of ‘its green and its great’, its also a matter of its green and it saves us lots of money, with among the many things that we’re doing, the new Home Recycling Centre (HRC) is doing very well indeed; but we want to do more.”

Mr Pearn added: “The performance through this period has been somewhat affected by C-19, with HRC closed for some time during that time and that has negatively impacted performance for this year, so I’m actually quite pleased to see even a minor increase bearing in mind the challenges that we’ve had to face in 2020.

“Contained within the report are some details of the developing resources and waste strategy that is forthcoming from the government.

“This is a sea change to how councils and industry will manage waste, and that is likely to significantly increase the performance that the council can achieve.

“We, and other partners, have been engaged in the consultation on that for quite a long time, with the second round of consultations starting in March 2021.”

Cllr Skibsted added: “With regard to the waste and recycling education and awareness raising programme, I don’t see any visible signs of that in my ward and I think there could more visible signs put up letting people know how their waste and recycling could be improved?”

James Collingridge, Head of Environmental Partnerships replied: “We do a lot of education with schools and community groups, but obviously with C-19 most of that has stopped and been put on hold until the end of the coronavirus epidemic.

“This has also meant that the educational trailer has not been out and about due to C-19.

“With regard to littering, we have put various posters up in and around the city and communities promoting the ‘Litter Fairy’ in schools so that children can relate to littering as being a bad thing and wrong; we feel that through educating the children they will then pass on that learning to their parents when they see them dropping litter and shaming them into using the proper litter facilities.”

Cllr Nick Sandford asked: “Cllr Skibsted has been told in response to one of her questions that the reason recycling has not been very high this year is because of C-19.

“Yet recycling figures for 2020, clearly show that recycling in Peterborough has actually increased during the crisis, so clearly C-19 not at fault.

“I’ve been at these meetings for many years now, and we seem to keep coming back to the issue of recycling over and over again.

“The truth is that Peterborough’s recycling performance is actually very poor in 2020; back in 2000, we were in the top five local authorities in the country in terms of recycling.

“The actual average in the country is now 43 per cent recycled, and we’re only managing 40%; but East Riding of Yorkshire Council is on 65 per cent, St Albans Council is on 62%, and there are twelve other councils on more than 60 per cent.

“As was mentioned earlier by Richard and Cllr Cereste, this isn’t only a green, environmentalist issue, it is a financial issue as well.

“Back in 2007, this council had a policy to achieve 65 per cent recycling by 2020; something we’ve clearly missed out on.

“Using the figures in this report, if every 1 per cent of recycling saves the council £48,000 then the fact that we’ve not achieved that 65 per cent target means we’ve lost out on something like £1,200,000 of income that the council could’ve used.

“So, I want to know what is going to be done to improve this absolutely awful performance?”

Cllr Cereste replied: “Thank you Cllr Sandford for asking me the same question for probably the twentieth time – as you well know Richard wrote you a performance report earlier in the year to position Peterborough City Council against its nearest demographic and city structure neighbours.

“That report clearly showed our performance meeting its target for local authorities with similar demographics, and our national performance positioning us roughly 190th out of about 300 local authorities, so somewhere in the middle of the league table.”

Cllr Sandford  said: “I don’t think I’ve asked the question twenty times, as Cllr Cereste suggests, but the reason I do keep asking the same question is because the performance figures never seem to improve.

“We were told a couple of years ago it was all AMEYs fault because they weren’t performing, so you took the contract away from them and gave it to Aragon.

“Now you’re telling us they’re not performing either – so I think, given the financial implications of this, that it does need to be improved.”

Cllr Cereste replied: “I’m getting a bit fed up of all the barrage of comments about how badly we’re doing in respect of our performance figures for recycling – if anybody, Cllr Sandford included, has any good ideas about how to increase our recycling that we haven’t already thought of, please do come forward, because we’d love to hear them.”

Members acknowledged the report and looked forward to updated figures at the next meeting of the Growth, Environment and Resources Scrutiny Committee on January 13, 2021.