What a waste! £300,000 bill for recycling 5% of St Helier’s rubbish

Tuesday 19 April 2016

St Helier’s pink and blue bag recycling scheme cost parishioners £300,000 last year, and only saw 5.3% of waste recycled.

The Parish spent £209,500 collecting the waste and another £105,900 sorting it, but only received £14,600 from the sale of the recycled materials.

The total amount recycled was just 818 tonnes – which works out at 5.3% of the total volume of waste that parishioners sent to the incinerator.

The figures have been revealed in response to a question under the Freedom of Information Law, which the parishes have had to comply with since September last year.

In their response to the questions, the Parish said: “The scheme runs at a £300k loss however it was not set up to make a profit, it was set up at the request of the parishioners to be able to recycle rather than send all waste to the incinerator.

“If the Parish did not collect the waste for recycling it would still need to be collected therefore the Parish would still incur very significant collection costs.”

St Helier Constable Simon Crowcroft said that he would be carrying out a “bench-marking” exercise to compare the parish’s costs to local authorities and small towns in the UK.

“It is the best that we can do at the moment, but I think that we can do better,” he said.

“We are cutting spending every year, and everything is decided by the parish ratepayers, so it’s entirely the ratepayers who decide whether we are going to spend a third of a million pounds on recycling.

“If they would rather all of that paper, cardboard and plastic was burned in the incinerator, they could come every July to the Assembly and ask for that to be changed.

“These figures make it all the more important that we get greater participation. Our fixed costs mean that the staff and vehicle costs are not going to rise greatly if we get more people participating. I am concerned that when I walk down some town streets on recycling day, only a minority of households are participating in the bag scheme, so to justify this expenditure we need to increase participation.”