WEST Yorkshire's Kirklees Council has won the prestigious Ashden award for its major home refurbishment programme. A third of the nation's greenhouse gases arise from home heating and Kirklees has a successful scheme for surveying homes and installing wall and loft insulation. So far, it has helped 25,000 homeowners. Typical savings in energy costs is in the region of £200 per year for each household.
Cash strapped Forest of Dean District Council on the other hand relies on meaningless press releases about its five year plan to cut carbon footprint by 25 per cent and electricity bills by tinkering with supply voltage.
At the same time, the council spends a significant part of its budget in a free green waste collection service for no other reasons than to meet perverse Government targets.
The green waste service will cost Forest of Dean householders over £1m a year including collection and central composting gate fees, even more when food waste collections start. Composting charges will rise from the present £25 per tonne to £50 per tonne to meet animal by-products regulations.
Every tonne of garden waste collected, transported and composted a remote location adds some 50kg of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and it is not too difficult to estimate that this service adds over 425 tonnes a year to the Forest's carbon footprint – more than what the council is planning to save over the coming five years. Collection of garden waste all through the year also baffles logic, as there is little to collect through autumn and winter except woody pruning.
The bulk of the 8,600 tonnes a year collected comes from rural areas where householders, even those with acres of land use the free service as an easy option. With global warming, green bulk production is set to rise as also cost for collecting this material, which can easily be dealt with closer to home. It was never collected before 2003 in any case.
Those living in built up areas and having difficulty with home composting product only a small fraction of the over 8,600 tonnes collected. Some forward-looking councils encourage home composting or have set up community composting schemes to help those in built up areas needing a local service.
In the Forest of Dean, we have withdrawn communal skips with the aim of increasing household collections and increase performance indicators. Despite a claimed 39 per cent our real recycling figure is 14 per cent which is in the bottom 50 of 390 English councils, and our waste collection costs are one of the highest in the country.
There must be better ways to reduce our costs for dealing with garden waste. At the same time, cost savings from this environmentally harmful free service can be channelled into helping households with insulation and other measures, which will bring real environmental benefits and help households save energy bills, following the Kirklees example. – Cllr Venk Shenoi (Church and Huntley).