‘We must return to waste reduction success’

Gary Hopkins, Lib Dem leader, argues that we must return to reducing residual waste, after it was announced the council will be taking over waste management.

When asked what he thought Bristol did better than Copenhagen, despite them beating us to the 2014 Green Capital crown, the ‘environmental’ mayor said “Waste, you have reduced and recycled we burn too much” .

Disappointing then that since winning the Green Capital title, Bristol’s residual waste is increasing after years of rapid reduction – and the solution to be used is shipping out to a Swedish incinerator.

Fortunately most of our black bag waste gets treated by the super environmentally friendly New Earth Solutions plant at Avonmouth under a joint West of England contract signed some years back. But unfortunately the mayor’s administration chose not to follow BANES who topped up their contract there when the other planned treatment plant was cancelled.

But why has the service started going backwards over the last couple of years? The decrease in residual (non-recycled) waste of 71 per cent from 2004/5–2014/15 hides a 22 per cent increase in the last two years.

This is extremely bad for the environment, but is also very expensive for the Bristol taxpayer. An extra 10,000 tons costs over £1 million.

In 2011 a new collection contract was signed with May Gurney. It had very ambitious performance standards and was massively less expensive than the previous contract.

Companies anxious to be associated with the leading Bristol waste brand were encouraged to compete and three leading companies did.

The resulting contract was great for Bristol and had very ambitious performance and environmental targets.

The waste figures continued to improve during the early years of the contract. May Gurney, who made no secret that they were losing significant sums on the contract, were seeking mutually agreed changes but these were not progressed and there was no engagement at a political level.

Not long afterwards May Gurney were taken over by Kier.

One of the key performance standards was to reduce residual waste, but performance was unfortunately not up to the standard promised originally by May Gurney and this gap seemed to widen  over time.

I made clear to our chief officer during the last year that we were unhappy about the divergence between promised performance levels and the actual outcomes and that I believed officers had done an excellent job to negotiate a very robust contract.

A number of Lib Dem councillors were also making clear that service levels were not acceptable in their wards and demanded active measures for improvement.

The new course of action suggested by our chief officer has my full support and we must now expect to return to the rapid rates of improvement in performance that we had been achieving up until the last couple of years.

Nothing less will do.