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Refuse Collection

We mentioned reuse in the report, but did not consider it in depth. We said that local authorities need to be thinking about what they can do to promote all three aspects—waste reduction, reuse and recycling—but we did not look into reuse in detail. Turning to the part of the report on collection methods, there has been a gradual shift towards AWC, which is the slightly more accurate way of describing what are popularly known as fortnightly collections. In almost every case, what is described as a fortnightly collection is a weekly collection in which the same things are not collected every week. Some things may be collected fortnightly, but there is a weekly collection. There has been a gradual shift towards AWC over the past decade, but it has accelerated in the past three years as councils have tried to boost recycling. There is a great debate as to whether the introduction of AWC has contributed to an increase in recycling. The Committee concluded that although there is an undoubted association between the introduction of AWC and an improvement in recycling rates, there is no demonstrable cause and effect. Councils that have introduced AWC have, quite properly, done so as part of a huge public education campaign in their area to explain what the change is, how it will work and why they are doing it. That may have contributed to the improvement in recycling rates as much as the waste being collected in a different way, although a number of councils that have introduced AWC were clear that, essentially, they were making it more difficult for householders to dispose of the residual waste left after they recycled. Those councils were seeking to engage householders' attention and get them to reduce the amount of residual waste, either by providing them with smaller bins, so it was more difficult for them to create large quantities of residual waste, or by deliberately having the residual waste collected only once a fortnight to make it more difficult and to encourage householders to reduce the amount of waste. However, councils that have not introduced AWC did have high recycling rates.