'Food caddies will end up in landfill'

Fears that hundreds of thousands of plastic caddies could end up landfill has been voiced by councillors over plans for delayed food waste collections in Coventry.

Coventry City Council will introduce a new weekly food waste recycling service for households in September - five months after the government's deadline.

Twenty-three litre food caddies will be distributed to residents and will be collected five days a week - leaving other bins to be collected on different days of the week.

Members of the council's communities and neighbourhoods scrutiny board raised concerns that having different bin collection days would cause confusion.

The council has ordered 141,000 food waste caddies with 23 litre capacity from £1.8m of capital funding received in April 2024 for the service.

The Simpler Recycling legislation was introduced to make recycling simpler, and to avoid people needing what it called an "excessive number of bins."

Sarah Elliott, the council's strategic lead for environmental services, told the board that by doing the collections over five days, they are reducing the size of the bin rounds - which improves wellbeing for staff.

She added: "That will mean that some residents will have food waste collected on a different day to other bins, but we will make sure through our communication with residents that it is clear when their collection days are.

"It already happens in some parts of the city."

Councillor Tim Sawdon said while his area in Warwick operates the same system, all the bins are collected on the same day.

He said: "I'm not sure that having different collection days is the best way to go about it.

"From what you have told me today, I am not entirely convinced that what you are proposing is going to work."

Coventry Council currently provides a bi-weekly food waste collection and recycling service for residents who pay for green waste collections.

People who do not pay, have to put their food waste into their rubbish bins.

People working in waste services have told the council that they wanted to switch to a five-day bin collection week.

Councillor Gavin Lloyd suggested pausing the collections until they could all be aligned, to avoid confusion.

Councillor Ed Ruane echoed concerns. He said: "You are more concerned about the staffing, but if you really want a good uptake on this then it has to as clear as possible.

"Personally, I would have liked to have seen it being a choice for the customer as to whether they opted in, because I suspect that 300,000 of these [caddies] will end up in landfill."

Councillor Grace Lewis added: "I think it is going to be chaos. I don't want to be too pessimistic but I just don't see this working."

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