Last week Wokingham Borough residents experienced the first collection of their food waste as part of the council’s initiative to increase our recycling rates.
In the first week of the scheme, some 66 tonnes were collected. This means that a good percentage of the 64,000 delivered caddies were used.
We apologise if some individual addresses were missed. We are doing our best to remedy this as quickly as possible. You can collect caddies and liners from various locations across the borough. To find your nearest visit www.wokingham.gov.uk and search ‘food waste’. If you are unable to collect them yourself please let us know via the online contact us form (www.wokingham.gov.uk/contact-us) and we will ensure delivery.
In the Wokingham Borough, some 30% of our blue bag rubbish is food waste. We hope to reduce this to 15% with the food waste scheme. This will help us recycle more of your waste, diverting it from the most expensive disposal costs and bringing our total recycling rates closer to 50%. From 2020, it is likely that councils not reaching a 50% recycling rate will be fined up to £500,000 per annum.
By reducing our food waste we also cut the levels of methane in the atmosphere. Methane is a dangerous greenhouse gas and by collecting food waste we can turn that methane into energy to use as fuel. The caddy liners are also recycled and used to generate electricity using Energy from Waste (EfW) technology.
“We would like to say a huge thank you to all of our residents who have started recycling their food waste,” said Sarah Hollamby, director of locality and customer services. Last week’s collections have showed great promise for our food waste recycling scheme. We’ve had lots of useful feedback and I’m so impressed by the enthusiasm of our residents for joining us in our fight to reduce Wokingham’s carbon footprint.
“There’s always room for improvement however, and I urge everyone who hasn’t used their caddy yet to join us. The more food waste we can recycle the better for our environment.”
For more details on where you can get new caddies and liners, as well as your food waste collection dates, go to www.wokingham.gov.uk and search ‘food waste’.
