Government asks Council for advice on chart-topping recycling rates
Published: Friday, 25 January, 2019
Stroud District Council has been asked for recycling tips from the Government after new figures revealed its residents are leading the way in England.
An Environment Minister has congratulated Stroud District Council for beating a national recycling target by a wide margin, well ahead of schedule.
Now Dr Thérèse Coffey MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Environment, has told the leader that she wants to know more about how the council and its waste and recycling partner has achieved a 61.2 per cent household recycling rate – up a massive 15.7 per cent on the year before.
One of the council’s five main priorities is to help the community minimise its carbon footprint, adapt to climate change and recycle more
Last month Department for Food Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) published figures which showed SDC is the highest performing council for recycling in the south west and has experienced the largest increase in ‘household waste’ recycling rates.
And much more importantly, of all local councils in England, SDC residents disposed of the least amount of residual waste to landfill/incineration – an average of 258.6kg per household per year in 2016/17.
“I wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate you on your performance in this year’s statistics for England’s household waste and recycling rates,” Dr Coffey wrote in a letter to the council. “The local authority of Stroud has gone above and beyond our national targets for 2020, by achieving 61.2% recycling rate from household waste in 2017/18, a substantial increase of 15.7 percentage points above your 2016/17 rate.”
She added that she was interested to learn more about the council’s success and wants to meet.
SDC stopped outsourcing its waste and recycling service in 2016 and brought in a new regime of collecting residual waste separately from compostable waste and recyclable waste with Ubico, in which Stroud District Council is a shareholder.
Mike Penney, senior operations manager at Ubico said:
“Our contract with Stroud District Council has made remarkable progress. Our team has worked extremely hard and importantly, in partnership with Stroud District Council to realise this greatly improved recycling rate. For me this demonstrates that the close working partnership and method of collection at Stroud is the right combination.”