South Shropshire food waste collections could be axed
Wednesday 28th July 2010, 2:47PM BST.
A pioneering food waste collection service across south Shropshire could be scrapped as part of budget cuts by Shropshire Council, it has emerged.
Food waste is currently picked up in collections in Ludlow, Craven Arms and Church Stretton and sent to the biodigester at Coder Road, Ludlow to be processed, producing biogas and fertiliser.
About 5,000 tonnes of food waste a year is collected and green electricity is produced.
Councillor Keith Barrow, leader of Shropshire Council, raised the possibility the collection service could be axed at a meeting of Ludlow and Clee area local joint committee last night.
Ludlow town councillor Viv Parry said Shropshire Council had asked the town council to take over the food waste collection and pay £40,000 for doing it.
She said: “I’m very sorry that you’re going to ask us to do that, as I don’t know if we can afford it or not.
“If we can’t, you’re still going to have to collect it in the main rubbish, because people will put it back in the black bins. It’s going to go back into landfill and cost you as a council.” She added: “It’s a lot of money for a very small council.”
But Councillor Barrow said: “Veolia have a contract to collect the waste so it’s not going to cost a penny more. Food waste is a nice idea but we are looking at the possibility of cutting libraries.”
Shropshire Councillor Rosanna Taylor-Smith, who chairs the local joint committee and represents Ludlow North, said: “We won’t be paying extra. Food will be going in green waste, for an awful lot of Shropshire residents; this is business as usual. The vehicles already go with our garden waste, I have been advised that it probably won’t mean any extra vehicles at all.”
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no suprise there then! this is all about the burner at battlefield it is bankrupting the council because its bought on a PFI contract. the council has clearly decided to go down the root of burning all waste even though this food waste recycling is cheaper, greener and more popular
idiots
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“no suprise there then! this is all about the burner at battlefield”
I’m not one-hundred percent sure that this is a logical argument.
Whilst I don’t personally agree with the incinerator, I find it fairly laughable that any news story regarding waste is either a result of, or inextricably linked to that project.
I’ve read this article a few times, and the first person to mention the incinerator was you, not any of the parties quoted.
Could it be possible that you would prefer this to be ‘all about the burner at Battlefield’ so that you (and countless others) can lament once again about the incinerator?
Or perhaps, like many other authorities around the UK, including those that are not engaged in large PFI contracts, there is a requirement that cuts will need to be made.
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Has he spoken to his boss, big dave and eric pickles have promised to bring back weekly bin day, now ludlow residents are being punished for voting tory by a tory council committed to unhygeinic fortnightly collections
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dont cut the collections , cut the disposal, waste less and axe the unpopular incinerator!!!
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This fabulous service should have been rolled out Countywide. But with Veolia pulling the strings, why bother continuing with it when it can all be burnt ‘safely’ at the battlefield incinerator, thusly making residents recycling practices all but redundant.
Shortsighted and utterly daft. Shows how out of touch this new authority is with local residents.
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TOTALLY AGREE DAVID
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good its a digusting and unhygenic idea to do these slop buckets and its all just to hit EU targets anyway, i say two fingers up to the EU, bring back weekly bin day and scrap these health and safety rules, its a recipe for flies and maggots to deal with all this food in this way it wouldnt be allowed in the private sector this kind of sloppy service, its typical of public sector service to do a half job and they dont even collect plastics which is most of my bin, idiots
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“It wouldn’t be allowed in the private sector”.
Oh really? I think you’ll find that rubbish and recycling is largely collected by a private outfits contracted to the local authorities.
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who took this decision? its an outrage, the bloated council is over staffed yet all they do is cut services, this is a frontline service it should be last on the list of cuts, staff should be cut first clerical and managerial roles not proper staff who are picking up bins, first they cut the skips, now this, just when will they realise all their costs are really in the shirehall
cut the back office function not the fronline waste collections
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im really concerned shropshire council is out of touch because we all want low council tax and understand the cuts will come but they still have all these over paid executives and they still waste money on so many big projects and yet they are constantly cutting the most sensitive services like skips, schools, meals on wheels, and now this, they are missing the point, the main cost of waste is disposal to landfill and this project is helping to stop landfill so its saving the council money. cutting it is a false economy because national policy is so in favour of Anaerobic Digestion that its likely to be given more grants and subsidies in the future, it could become a cash cow longer term, to cut it is really economically illiterate, there must be so many soft cuts the council could make like all the glossy leaflets and magazines they keep sending me, cut the cheifs not the indians, cut the waste not the recycling programme
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why are all he cuts in south shropshire? i dont see them cutting services in shrewsbury
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Every time councillor Barrow or one of his cohorts makes a pronouncement it makes people realise that the whole county government for Shropshire is a costly flawed failure.
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Surely with a unitary council this should be everywhere or nowhere? why only ludlow?
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It’s my understanding that these places are the only areas under the authority where this scheme runs.
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Mr Barrow seems to want to push the Battlefield incinerator down our throats in any way he can, doesn’t he? The cost of £8 per tonne to collect food waste is much less than the £12 per tonne which Veolia charges to collect our household waste, less than the current landfill tax of £48 per tonne, and far less than the proposed incinerator costs of £120+ per tonne (don’t forget that Veolia will still charge that £12 for collecting on top). These costs will all be increased by indexation. And the anaerobic digester at Ludlow produces electricty and compost for sale (does it charge to take waste?); it must also be remembered that the digester was awarded around £450,000 of government (not council) funding last year. I agree with the above comments that the unitary council (which was forced through with the support of S. Shropshire and against the wishes of SABC) is just not up to the job of running the county effectively or efficiently.
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have they spoken to the government about this? the new tory coalition says it will make more Anaerobic Digestion a top waste priority, so is conservative controlled shropshire county council helping or hindering the UK drive towards weekly collection, green energy and turning more food into energy and compost through anaerobic digestion ?
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mr barrow is not very good at economics and clearly doesnt understand waste management, has the council listened to the advice printed by WRAP the governments expert waste advisors, they have proven that councils who collect food waste weekly capture much more waste and thus have less to landfill which is where the real cost saving is to be had, councils who collect food waste fortnightly just end up with most of it still going in the black bin to landfill so they have higher disposal costs. I thought Barrow would want to cut costs at the council, if he did he would introduce WEEKLY food waste collections everywhere in shropshire not just ludlow because the real cost of waste management is expensive landfilling and incineration contracts which the council has got sucked into. the only variable cost the council now has is waste disposal, so cutting waste disposal is the best way to save tax payers money
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how does this help residents recycle more? its just another tory cut
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Simplistic thinking because real thinking is SO hard!
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who the hell is running services in shropshrie now veolia or the councillors ??
they seem so ignorant of nationally accepted best practice which all independant waste management experts agree is a good way to go.
Ludlow was once the highest for recycling in the whole UK and top of the pops! since veolia took it over its been rubbish
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i would hope my local Councillors would stand up for us, not join in with the cuts with glee like its a good thing to replace a weekly collection with a fortightly one and close an innovative AD plant to help fund a mass burn incinerator!
are these people stupid, corrupt, mad, bad or all of them, this is such an ignorant decision!
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the first thing our new Conservative government said they would do was back AD, now this? whats going on? they are also (according to the secretary of state for local government eric pickles) going to give councils funding to bring in weekly collections. So what on earth is shropshire council doing going against their own government like this?
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You have not got a Conservative goverment, you have the ConDemmed party.
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looks like the cllrs are completely at odds with national conservative policy
see this link – government wants WEEKLY collections and more AD
http://www.letsrecycle.com/do/ecco.py/view_item?listid=37&listcatid=217&listitemid=55947§ion=legislation
either the government is lying or shropshire cllrs are rebelling against the government, either way it shows big chaos in shropshire
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weekly is the only hygeinic way to collect food, otherwise it will all go to landfill because you need to wrap it in a plastic bag it is simply not hygenic to place it in your garden waste bin for 2 weeks! common sense tells anyone with a brain thats what will happen to the food, espcially when people are put out by the decision, cant the councillors see that?! it seems so obvious to anyone wiht common sense how people will react
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oh dear some conservative councils are talking to their conservative leader who wants to reduce rubbish and promote technologies like A.D. see link below
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10800759
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this is probably the most popular project the council has ever done, are they insane! do they want our votes or what because im all for cutting the waste at shire hall but not the waste reducing activities like this, its all taking waste which would otherwise have gone to landfill and turning it into clean green energy and compost. that is what every council in the uk should be doing, this is officially best practice, stopping it is so short sighted because in the long term this technology is going to be a gold mine for the council if they keep it
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Fortnightly collections were said to be a Labour invention but this is a Conservative Council under a Conservative government brining in unhygenic fortnightly bin collections
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im not happy about this at all
i will not bother recycling in future
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this is terribly short sighted thinking, there will come a point in the future where due to the subsidies involved anaerobic digestion plants will become a licence to print moeny and food waste could have a value like aluminium and steel
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such a shame they dont just wait for a year or so because if they read the coalition agreement they would see that the government is going to incentivise councils to go down the anaerobic digestion route, so they will miss out on loads of subsidies in future as a result of this
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5000 tonnes of waste! by my calculations that would cost atleast £200,000 to landfill today and double that in 5 years thus completely eliminating any where near the £40,000 saving they talk about!! thats stupid. Ok even if say half of it ends up in the compost bins (and i would be suprised because most people would not) thats still hundreds of thousands of pounds of extra disposal costs for the tax payer to bear. So I ask the local councillors – has anyone accounted for the disposal costs involved with this decision ??
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It seems a bit childish to say ‘I’m not going to recycle anymore, so there!’
Why do people have so much rubbish?
I live in a house of five adults and find the fornightly collection ample.
I very rarely throw out food though admittedly keep a couple of chickens which helps.
Any leftovers are frozen and make great spare dinners for those who keep funny hours. With microwave ovens and freezers there is little excuse for waste today.
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what a tragic waste
I know from Ludlow chamber of commerce that this was a really succesfful scheme, and i know the businesses that used it would have found it very helpful, now shropshire council which claims its pro business is increasing costs for ludlow businesses in the middle of a recession, this could send some to the wall and then they will get less rates anyhow its bonkers
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As a man in his fifties I had no idea this still went on, as a child holidaying in Bournemouth I vaguely remember taking scraps down to the pig bins at a boarding house. I did not realise food waste was still being collected.
Is this a national thing or just a rural culture ? I am genuinely surprised.
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