Whilst the country’s average recycling rate decreased this year, Westminster City Council, in partnership with Veolia, increased their rate by 3.7 percentage points. This places them as one of the top ten most improved boroughs in the whole country thanks to residents participating in the new food waste recycling service.
Westminster’s recycling rate has increased by an impressive 3.7 percentage points this year to 24.6%, despite the country’s average recycling rate decreasing by 0.8. This is largely thanks to their innovative food waste recycling service which accounts for around 10% of total recycling across the borough. 81,976 tonnes of waste were collected this year from residential households in Westminster, with 20,135 tonnes of this sent for reuse, recycling or composting. Westminster is the most improved borough in London this year for recycling as well as one of the top ten boroughs across the entire country.
The food waste recycling service, now available to over 87% of households in Westminster due to the team’s innovations, won the ‘Service Change at Local Authority Level’ award at last year’s Awards for Excellence, and ‘Local Authority Success’ at the National Recycling Awards. Since Westminster’s food waste service rolled out just over two years ago, almost 3,000 tonnes of food waste have already been collected.
In such an ultra-urban and diverse borough, services have been tailored by Westminster City Council and Veolia to make them suitable for all property types in the City. After an initial roll-out to properties with enough space for food waste bins, two new innovative services have been designed.
A ‘neighbourhood’ service provides communal on-street bins for around 19,000 homes without storage space for bins or bags. So far 57 bins have been installed across the City.
For around 30,000 West End residents, a completely different service was needed. The on-demand service enables residents to book a two hour collection slot for the convenient collection of their bag of food waste from their front door, meaning no waste is ever left out on the pavement. This rapid and personal service was made possible with a new fleet of EAV collection bikes.
Helder Branco, General Manager of Veolia Westminster said : “This is a fantastic result, and demonstrates that food waste services in challenging urban environments can work, when innovation and resident needs are at the heart of the project. The latest addition to the food waste expansion, the on-demand service, showcases this perfectly and demonstrates our commitment to delivering Ecological Transformation throughout our services. The team’s innovations would have been for nothing, however, without the residents of the City of Westminster embracing the change and using their new food waste service, as this huge recycling rate increase demonstrates.”
