Residents offered bins choice as city recycling service expands

Plans for a new garden waste collection service, however, have been put on hold indefinitely because of council budget cuts and the opening hours of waste recycling centres will also be reduced.

Sheffield Council began rolling out its new £3m expanded recycling service last year, when every household given a new blue plastic box to be used for paper.

Previously, recyclable paper was put in a large blue wheelie bin, but residents were told that this now needed to be used for tins, glass and plastic bottles.

When the revised recycling service was introduced, many people complained that the paper boxes were too heavy, became full too quickly and were not weather-proof.

Opposition councillors then proposed that residents should be able to choose which recyclables they wanted to put in each container, an idea that was then adopted by the leading Liberal Democrat group.

The changes are now set to go before a Sheffield Council Cabinet committee meeting on Wednesday, February 23. If agreed, people could begin using their large blue boxes for paper again from April.

The Liberal Democrat Cabinet member for climate change, Andrew Sangar, said: “We have listened to feedback from local people and want to give them the flexibility to decide how to use the blue containers.

“It will still be important for the paper and card to be kept separate from other recycled materials, but we always planned a review once the new service had been fully rolled out.

“The response has been extremely positive and I’m delighted that we are able to make this improvement.

“The new recycling service is a key Liberal Democrat priority and it has been an outstanding success so far.

“We are collecting around an extra 60 per cent recycling materials from the kerbside and, unlike other areas, our recycling rates are on the increase.

“We hope this greater flexibility will make it even easier for people to recycle more in the future.”

Liberal Democrats on Sheffield Council have already ruled out switching to fortnightly bin collections as the authority aims to cope with an £80m cut in its budget over the next financial year.

Officers had put the suggestion to councillors in the belief that fortnightly collections could be cheaper and could potentially encourage people to recycle more.

But the policy has proved unpopular in many parts of the country and council leader Paul Scriven said the authority wanted to reflect the wishes of residents.

The report set to go before Wednesday’s Cabinet committee meeting says that there are still no plans to cut the number of wheelie bin collections – though the waste service is not immune to the budget cuts.

The report says: “We are not going to move to fortnightly general household waste collection.

“We also know that Sheffield people have waited a long time for a better recycling service and we intend to protect our investment in the new blue boxes and bins service.

“We cannot fully protect the waste management budget, though, and we have therefore decided to postpone the rollout of the enhanced ‘green waste’ collection service that we had hoped to start in April.”

In terms of the cut in opening hours of council recycling centres, chief executive John Mothersole said: “We want to preserve the core service quality of the weekly bin collection.

“There will always be a recycling centre open and our view is that the people of Sheffield will be prepared to wait a little longer or travel a little further.”

All of these plans, however, could change should Labour break the Liberal Democrats’ weak hold on the town hall in the coming local elections in May.