IN a bid to cut costs and improve the city's dismal recycling rate, Liverpool City Council is changing the way the bins are emptied.
Alternate fortnightly collections for more than 100,000 households will start from October 28.
It will mean purple household waste bins will be collected one week, with blue bins for recycled material and green bins for garden waste collected the next.
The changes will not apply to houses which use plastic sacks for waste collection.
Steve MunbyThe council says proposals will be developed to help all residents improve their recycling. Currently, Liverpool’s recycling rate is 26 percent, lagging behind the Merseyside average of 37 percent and other major cities of 30.07 per cent. The top 10 areas for recycling all have alternate fortnightly collections.
It is estimated that, with increases to the Landfill Tax by which councils get charged per tonne of waste that is not recycled, moving to managed weekly collection services will save up to £1m a year.
It is also believed that it will deliver at least a 10 per cent increase in recycling and recovery of material, significantly reducing the impact upon the local environment.
“It costs us about £32m a year on collecting, recycling and disposing waste in the city,“ said Councillor Steve Munby, cabinet member for living environment and localism. “This is at a time when the council is having to find savings of around £50m next year and a total of £156m by 2017.
Purple
He added that it wasn't just an exercise in reducing costs.
“All the evidence is that a lot of what is put in purple bins at the moment should be recycled. For most householders using their recycling and garden waste bins effectively should mean that their purple bin will not be full.
“There are huge differences in how you are able to store bins at a terraced house and how you can store bins in a semi-detached property with a garden, so we are looking at this sensibly and at different ways of collecting in different parts of the city.”
