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Gloucestershire Business News

New recycling scheme collects enough rubbish to heat 200 homes

The success of a new recycling scheme in Stroud has exceeded expectations, it was announced today.

Just three months after the new food waste recycling service was rolled out to 52,000 households, residents are now sending half the amount of rubbish to landfill that they used to and their recycling rate has nearly doubled.

For the first time ever, the district's residents are putting out more recycling than rubbish for landfill.

The first three months have shown that the amount of rubbish sent to landfill has dropped to 114kg per person, per year, well beyond the target to reduce it to 228kg per person by 2020 set by the Gloucestershire County Council.

Cllr Simon Pickering, chair of Stroud District Council's environment committee, said: "Our citizens really have embraced the new service.

"We always knew that the district's residents were keen on recycling and reducing waste and even though we expected the figures to improve significantly, we never imagined that they would be this good, this soon.

"These figures are a tremendously pleasant surprise and a great endorsement of everyone's commitment to recycling.

"Within the first couple of weeks of the new service starting, our hard-working crews on the ground anecdotally reported that 90 per cent of homes were already putting their food waste out for collection.

"These figures back that up as we are collecting over 500 tonnes of food waste a month."

The food waste is sent to an anaerobic digester where it is recycled into gas and fertiliser.

The 503 tonnes collected from the district's residents each month is enough to heat nearly 200 homes and provides around 450 tonnes of fertiliser for farming.

The amount of waste going to landfill each month has dropped from 2,153 tonnes to 1,074.

This means that within the first three months of starting to recycle food waste, the district's residents are already sending close to 50 per cent less waste to landfill than other parts of Gloucestershire.

Paper, card and carton recycling in recycling boxes has gone up by nearly 10 per cent and green wheelie-bins are now six per cent fuller.

The overall recycling rate has gone from 31 per cent to just short of 60 per cent, and that's without including garden waste recycling.

Incorporating garden waste into the figures sends it to well over 60 per cent.

At the same time, the total amount of rubbish and recycling produced by households has dropped by 16 per cent, with 7,835 tonnes collected over the three-month period of November 2016 to January 2017 from the district's homes, compared to 9,343 tonnes a year earlier - a drop of 500 tonnes a month.

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