New Refuse and Recycling Service begins in Ross-shire and parts of Wester Ross next week
New refuse and recycling collections in Ross-shire, Ullapool and the Achiltibuie and Lochcarron areas of Wester Ross come into effect on Monday 3rd October.
From this date householders will receive a fortnightly refuse collection, alternating with a fortnightly recycling collection from blue recycling bins. Both collections will be on the same day of the week – recycling one week and refuse the next.
Householders should, by the end of this week, have received a guide explaining the new collections and a calendar showing their collections dates. Residents of areas in Ross-shire currently receiving blue box recycling collections for paper and tin cans should also have been delivered a new blue recycling bin. The blue wheelie bins take a wider range of materials – paper, cardboard, food tins and drink cans and plastic bottles. Households between Garve and Lochcarron and Garve and Achiltibuie will receive a kerbside recycling service for the first time and should also have been delivered blue bins. Residents in any of these areas who have not received a bin or calendar and guide should contact the Council on 01349 886603.
Households with, now redundant, blue boxes are encouraged to use these to store glass bottles and jars before taking them to a Recycling Point – currently, on average, households are only recycling about half their glass bottles and jars; the rest end up in landfill – costing Council Tax payers a total of £117 per tonne in landfill tax and disposal charges.
Existing garden waste collections will remain unchanged. Residents of the other, more rural, areas are urged to try composting at home and avoid putting garden waste in their refuse bin. Organic material, such as garden waste, is particularly harmful when buried in landfill sites as it emits climate changing gases. Excess garden waste can also be taken to Recycling Centres for composting.
The Highland Council’s commercial customers in Ross-shire and the above parts of Wester Ross are also being offered recycling collections for the first time – a move that has been welcomed by environmentally aware businesses. Although some businesses have needed to invest in additional bins, the new collections have the potential to offer considerable financial savings over time as the charges for recycling collections are significantly lower than those for refuse collections. Some businesses have been able to ‘convert’ refuse bins to recycling bins using blue stickers provided by the Council.
The new collections, which have already been introduced in Skye and Lochalsh, Lochaber, Caithness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, will be extended to the whole of the Highland Council area over the coming year.
Councillor John Laing, chairman of the TEC services committee said that the new collection service showed the way forward and would offer both financial savings and environmental benefits: “Where the new collections have already been introduced there has been a significant increase in recycling. Our recycling rate for April to June this year was 2.7% up from the same quarter in 2010/11. Even more importantly, there was a reduction of 1,956 tonnes in landfilled waste for the same period. For the Council to meet our Scottish Government long term targets of recycling 70% of all waste by 2025, we need everyone to make the best use of the recycling services that are being put in place.”
The Highland Council’s Waste Awareness Team can offer advice on reducing waste and increasing recycling to both householders and its business customers and can be contacted on 01349 886603 or by emailing recycle@highland.gov.uk