WILL IT work? Will residents co-operate with Tower Hamlets Council’s new scheme to recycle food waste in the borough? It’s in place to meet new government requirements, so all residents will be involved eventually. Let’s explain what’s going on.
It all began a couple of years ago, when the Government announced that all Councils would have to collect, and dispose of, food waste separately from general rubbish (“residual waste”) by 31st March 2025 or 31st March 2026 in special cases.
Most Councils have a mix of flats and houses: they could scale up their existing schemes and/or introduce new ones to the flats. Around 85% of the properties in Tower Hamlets are flats. The Council’s previous food waste collections had only been offered to around 20% of properties, so the task of extending it to the flats in the borough was huge. Recognising the scale of the challenge, the Government gave Tower Hamlets Council until 31st March 2027 to set up a scheme which could be applied to everyone.
Collecting food waste from houses is fairly easy. You deliver caddies to houses; residents fill them; residents put the caddies on the pavement once a week; the Council empties the caddies; residents clean their caddies; the process repeats itself. Despite the extra time allocated to it to address the logistics of collecting food waste from flats, the Council has decided to use the same approach to flats as it does to houses.
Sensibly, the Council is implementing its scheme in stages, starting on Council estates, where residents “will have the opportunity to recycle their food waste separately from their general rubbish and mixed dry recycling”. Will residents be grateful for the opportunity? To take advantage of this opportunity, you have to keep your food waste in your kitchen all week, before you take it downstairs to put it in the communal bin. Alternatively, you can empty your food slops into the communal bin downstairs more often.
Residents already put too much recycling in the general waste bin, and vice versa. Do they really want to keep their food, getting stinky, in the kitchen for a week? Do they really want to go and empty food waste into the new food waste bins every couple of days? Doubtless we shall see in due course.
Sadly, it didn’t have to be like this. Residents on the Dorset estate have come together as the City Soil Lab. They too hand out food caddies to residents – but they use the “bokashi anaerobic fermentation” technique. This involves adding an enzyme which ferments the food waste – without creating a smell. The fermented waste turns into a growing medium and then into a rich, organic fertiliser.
Tower Hamlets Council had the opportunity to be a trail-blazer: giving residents a non-smelly method of turning food waste into a product they could sell. Instead, they are spending huge sums on caddies and communal bins and transport to take the waste to a traditional anaerobic digester – which will sell the product itself. What a missed opportunity!
●Read more about it: Faith, Climate, Recycling: the Summit 2024 “O&S” struggles to improve recycling