Coun Jane Scullion: Circular economy

By Coun Jane Scullion, Leader Calderdale Council:

Getting the bins emptied is one of the valuable things that every council organises. If we didn’t, rubbish would rapidly pile up and our towns would quickly become smelly and horrible.

And goodness knows, as a society we produce enough waste. We have so much stuff these days, stuff that breaks or goes wrong. Sticking our unwanted stuff in holes in the ground is the last resort, and it’s costly too. Each tonne of waste that can’t be recycled costs the council-tax payer a whopping £135.

Luckily, not everything in the ‘general waste’ skips is lost to landfill. Calderdale’s skips go to Leeds where the material goes through another sorting process. In fact, only one per cent is completely unsalvageable and goes to those holes in the ground.

Of course it’s much better to recycle what we can first. Recently I spoke to one of our council officers who told me that Calderdale residents are pretty good at separating out recycling into the different boxes and sacks, so that we have very little cross-contamination compared with other local council areas. Well done, us!

And our food waste gets reprocessed by a company called ReFood, using a technique called anaerobic digestion. The organic material is biologically broken down and used to generate biogas (methane and carbon dioxide), which is fed into the National Grid.

But our recycling rate in the borough is not yet reaching 50 per cent of total waste, so maybe we need to be more creative. I’ve been impressed at the success of the Revive Shop at the Brighouse Household Waste Centre. Last year, over 21,500 items were ‘revived’ and passed on to new owners, second-hand. In the first nine months of this year, 34 tonnes of would-be waste at Brighouse have been saved and reused in this way.

This is catching on in Calderdale. The excellent volunteer-run Makery initiative at community-owned Todmorden Community College is one example I know of personally. And I must also give praise to the similar Repair Cafes operating in Skircoat, Heptonstall, and Mytholmroyd. These too are successful ventures, using the skills of committed volunteers. Thank you to them all.

I feel that we need to begin to think about building a circular economy, a virtuous circle where as far as possible nothing ever leaves the loop. Stuff we might have been tempted in the past to throw out gets fettled, welded, mended or darned, and – hey presto – it’s there to be used again. Great to get that glow of virtue which comes from reviving and re-wearing a much-loved jumper that has developed a moth hole over the years.

By the way, you may know that we felt we had to introduce a residents’ permit scheme at our household waste transfer centres recently. Over 30,000 of you have already got the permits, and it’s easy to do online. People in places like Huddersfield and Queensbury were slipping into our sites – and we felt that Calderdale people wouldn’t really be very happy to carry on paying £135 a tonne for other local councils’ waste! I hope you understand our thinking here.