I was saddened to discover that Labour councillor Barrie Hargrove has decided Southwark Council should ignore the 9month food waste pilot they initiated. This pilot has involved over 10,400 homes and largely been a success and we’re all working on fixing the issues.

It involved collecting food waste, metals, plastics, glass and paper recycling every week and everything else fortnightly. This difference between 1 week for recycling and fortnightly for everything else encouraged people to maximise their recycling to get stuff taken away. In the pilot area some week 53% has been recycled.

But the pilot has been ignored.

The pilot and 37,000 other homes in Southwark will have weekly food waste and fortnightly recycling and everything else collections. This is said to save £125,000 a year over the 47,000 homes or £2.65 per home per year. But it only has to result in 27kg of recycling from each home each year going into the wrong wheelie bin and this saving won’t be made. On average each Southwark home throws away more than 1,000kgs a year. More than 27kg per home in the wrong wheelie bin and it will cost more than keeping weekly rubbish collections. I could understand if for the first year only weekly recycling collectionswere made to get people into this virtuous habit but sadly this isn’t the plan.

I call on Southwark Council to maximise recycling from these changes rather than take the risk of a worse service costing council tax payers more.