RECAP News
04/07/2008 - Peterborough investigates best options for recycling food waste
Councillors working on plans to increase household recycling rates in Peterborough are now investigating the best options for dealing with kitchen food waste.
Peterborough residents are already among the country’s top recyclers, setting a new high of 46 per cent of household and garden materials being recycled or composted last year. However, Peterborough City Council is aiming to raise recycling levels beyond 65 per cent – one of the country’s highest targets – and stop burying waste in landfill sites.
Kitchen food waste is now by far the biggest single component going into black wheelie bins for dumping at the Dogsthorpe landfill site. However, it produces methane – a powerful climate change gas – as it rots and environmental protection laws mean all councils have to make big reductions in landfilled biodegradable waste.
Councillor Wayne Fitzgerald, cabinet member for the environment, explained: “Under the city council’s waste strategy we have promised to introduce a system for collecting and treating food waste to prevent it being dumped.
“There are two main options for achieving that objective and we want to choose a system that is both effective and easy for householders to operate. They both involve natural processes but require different methods of collection and processing.”
Councillors serving on a cross-party Members’ Waste and Recycling Working Group have undertaken fact-finding visits to facilities that operate the different processes to help draw up recommendations for introduction in Peterborough, possibly next year.
In one system, called in-vessel composting, food waste is mixed with organic garden material and subjected to a double heat treatment process to kill off harmful bacteria, such as e-coli and salmonella. Oxygen-breathing microbes convert it into compost that can be used to improve garden soils, spread on farmland or used for landscaping.
Under the other system – called anaerobic digestion – food waste is collected separately and subjected to an oxygen-free process during which microbes create biogas. The biogas is captured and is burned to generate renewable electricity and heat and the remaining material is used as a farmland fertilizer or as compost.
The new food waste treatment measures are part of a comprehensive waste management strategy – approved in February 2007 – that is needed to avoid huge financial penalties if the city council fails to comply with stringent landfill reduction targets.
Peterborough, which landfilled 50,000 tonnes last year, must cut biodegradable landfilled waste to just 34,135 tonnes by 2009/10; to 22,736 tonnes by 2012/13; and to 15,909 tonnes by 2019/20.
Local authorities that fail to achieve their landfill reduction targets will incur fines of £150 per tonne of ‘over-target’ waste and have to pay a proportion of a £500,000 daily fine if the UK fails to achieve its cumulative target.
The government’s escalating landfill tax – rising in £8 annual increments from £24 per tonne last year to £48 in 2010/11 – adds to the financial pressure in favour of recycling. In addition, the Dogsthorpe landfill tip used by the city council is expected to be filled to capacity by summer 2012.
For more information visit www.65percentplus.co.uk or www.peterborough.gov.uk/page-10711.
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