Issue - meetings

As detailed in the recommendations.

Councillor Hughes introduced the report and explained that over the last five years the Waste Strategy had been reviewed three times with the most recent review being the ‘Target 70’ in July 2021.  Those reviews had allowed the Council to implement major service changes, which had contributed to improving the way waste and recycling services were delivered.

In its current Waste Strategy ‘Beyond Recycling’, Welsh Government (WG) set statutory targets for local authorities in Wales to reuse, recycle or compost a minimum of 64% of waste by 2022-23, and 70% of waste by 2024-25.

However, recycling performance levels in Flintshire had progressively decreased year on year with the COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions having a significant impact.  The purpose of this review was to focus on achieving the statutory recycling targets and avoiding financial penalties if they failed to be achieved.

Following two all-Member workshops in November 2022, the report outlined how it was proposed to minimise waste and maximise recycling in order to improve recycling performance and achieve the statutory recycling targets.

Following a recent compositional analysis, initial results had shown that up to 50% of what was placed in the residual waste bins by residents in Flintshire was recyclable material.  Furthermore, 27% of the residual waste contents was found to be food waste.  With a separate weekly kerbside collection service available for food waste and weekly collection for recycling, the current situation was not sustainable and remained a significant risk to the local authority.

The general themes of feedback from the Member workshops was outlined in the report.  A key measure introduced by a number of other local authorities across Wales was to limit how much waste households could throw away. By restricting the capacity of the residual waste bin, people were encouraged to make more use of the recycling kerbside collection service.  Reducing residual waste could be achieved by reducing the capacity of the residual waste bin or changing the frequency of waste collections. 

A comparison of a number of waste collection models across Wales had taken place and it was clear that restricting residual waste improved recycling levels which in turn had a significant impact on recycling performance.  Reducing residual waste capacity to 60 litres had seen the following average improvements:

·         Overall reduction in household residual waste (including Household Recycling Centres) of 30%

·         Increase in kerbside dry recycling of 17%

·         Increase in good waste capture of 28%

If the collection frequency changed from the current fortnightly model, that would have an impact on required resources to deliver the collection services.  Full details were provided in the report.  A change in collection frequency could require consideration of changes to the container size or container types, which would involve further considerations including funding, health and safety, impact on crews, compatibility with vehicles and storage for residents. 

Capital funding would be required to procure alternative sized residual waste containers should a change in container size be required.  That was estimated to be in the region of £1m.

The Chief  ...  view the full minutes text for item 109