Local recycling rates

Yesterday was Global Recycling Day, which gives me the opportunity to tackle a subject I’ve meant to write about for some time, Crawley’s local recycling rate.

For some years now, the Conservatives have criticised the council for having some of the smallest recycling volumes in the country, much the same as when they ran the council. This is a perfectly true statement for them to make, but it tells less than half the story of what is going on, for instance the fact that Crawley also throws away less than almost any other part of the country.

Let’s start with the figures. Out of the 304 waste collection authorities in England, Crawley has the 28th lowest volume of waste sent to recycling. There are a few issues with using volume as the key metric, to begin with it fails to take population size into account. It also ignores housing composition, for instance shared bins in flats tend to result in more contaminated waste, as one household failing to follow the rules will result in the waste for the entire block going to landfill.

More significantly, there’s the question of what constitutes recycling. For the purposes of the Government’s measures, green waste is included in the metric, so the more properties with gardens and the larger the garden the better the recycling rate regardless of any other consideration. In fact, as it comes down to tonnage, you could make yourself the best local authority in the country for recycling if you stored all your green waste outside before weighing it to ensure it was saturated with rain first.

Lastly, as I said before, there’s the issue of overall waste volumes. While we have the same issues with population size not being taken into account, overall waste volumes in Crawley are in the bottom quintile. Given that the priority is to reduce, reuse and recycle, the overall benefit to the system is greatest not by people recycling, but by not producing waste in the first place, and here Crawley is ahead of the curve.

Does this mean that there isn’t room for improvement. Absolutely not, we know from inspecting lorry loads of black bin waste that people are still throwing recyclable materials away, but it does mean that Crawley isn’t the extreme case the Conservatives are trying to make us out to be.

So, what can be done about that. Firstly, there’s educational efforts, working to help people to both understand the importance of recycling and the rules around what can go into the red-top bin and the black-top bin. This is particularly important in areas where cultural or language differences may mean that people simply aren’t aware of what the correct process is supposed to be.

This is something that the borough council is doing, but it has become harder since the funding was withdrawn. For once, this wasn’t a central government issue, it was a county council one.

While district-tier councils like Crawley collect the waste, the disposal of that waste is overseen by the county council. When it comes to recycling, this generates an income stream in selling the materials on for the local authority, which used to be shared with district councils relative to the volumes they contributed, which was then used to fund educational efforts around recycling (a virtuous circle, given that the more you recycle the better the funding).

Unfortunately, this funding was withdrawn five or so years ago, as part of cost-cutting efforts by the county council, undermining these efforts. The kicker being that many of those most enthusiastically criticising the borough council for its low recycling rates played a key role in removing the funding to improve those rates at the county council. I guess that’s politics for you.

Beyond education, the only other idea anyone has come up with for improving recycling rates is to reduce the black-top bin collections. The theory being, that low recycling rates are being driven by people being lazy and if they have no choice, but to recycle then behaviour will be modified.

I’m not desperately keen on this viewpoint. Putting aside that it’s very paternalistic, it seems to me that if people genuinely care that little about the impact of the decisions they take around their waste then there’s nothing to stop them using the red-top collecting to dispose of their residual waste, contaminating every truckload.

It’s also clearly not what the public wants. When we had to cut costs during the pandemic, we consulted residents on the options. It was the best-responded consultation we have ever received and people made it clear that retaining the weekly bin collection took priority over all other options. So, whenever the Conservatives call for action, but fail to state what action that should be, it’s not hard to work out why.

On the topic of the weekly bin collection, it is just about the most visible service councils have and the only one which literally everyone uses directly. Consequently, for councils it’s a really important service, since if you get it wrong it’s the one area where you can annoy everyone all at once.

So, if you want to see evidence of how well Crawley’s finances have been run compared to other councils, you can find it in the fact that we are one of the less than 15% of councils which have managed to find the money to retain that flagship weekly bin collection. This is despite the fact that a growing number of councils now have a bin collection only once every three-weeks or in one case once every four-weeks.

Whether Crawley can continue to maintain a weekly bin collection is largely a matter for central government, either in terms of further cuts to council incomes or changes to national recycling policy.