A review a new recycling system across Lichfield and Burntwood says the roll out caused frustration for residents – and warned it must not be allowed to happen again.
Lichfield District Council introduced the dual stream collections in May, with households having to separate out card and paper into new blue bags.
But the roll out was initially blighted by issues such as concerns over the capacity of the bags and missed collections.
An independent review has since been carried out and has highlighted a number of issues with the roll-out of the new dual waste system.
A report by Cllr Liz Little, cabinet member for waste and recycling, to a meeting of the council’s overview and scrutiny committee said:
“The new rounds implemented as part of the new recycling service roll out, undertaken by a commercial organisation rather than one experienced at providing a local authority service, together with the decision to divert drivers from collection rounds to bag deliveries, significantly restricted the crews’ capacity and capability to complete new recycling rounds.
“There was therefore a period of persistent round non-completions which adversely impacted on residents, particularly following the commencement of dual-stream collections from 2nd May.
“There were frustration from ward councillors and residents over a lack of urgency in the response to these issues which were being reported daily.”
Cllr Liz Little, Lichfield District Council
The report said staff were also not fully prepared for the changes and that the need to move workers to complete missed rounds meant further frustration was caused due to delays in black bin collections.
“Despite training prior to implementing the new service, waste crews were unclear in some areas over what could be recycled. The service was slow in implementing ‘toolbox talks’ to aid understanding of the collection crews.
“Bin ‘tagging’ caused significant anger to residents as crews were correctly refusing to collect waste put out, but without explaining on the red and yellow tags exactly why.”
Cllr Liz Little, Lichfield District Council
“The public response became hostile”
Communication over the new waste collection service was also described as a “critical point of failure in the project”.
“Initial information was sent and received well. However, once problems started occurring, the public response became hostile.
“Additional negative public comments were received following a press release stating that the blue bags procured were not the correct size. This exacerbated the situation.
“Communications was a critical point of failure in the project. Both the joint waste and customer contact teams were overwhelmed by the volume of complaints and service requests that were received – all of which required an element of manual processing and many required double-handling by customer contact and then joint waste.
“The service became slow to respond to even the most routine requests, exacerbating resident dissatisfaction.”
Cllr Liz Little, Lichfield District Council
The report added that the roll-out was now largely complete, but that it was too early to draw full conclusions.
However, it said data had shown that the number of reports of missed bins had dropped along with the number of contaminated loads.
“The quality of the recycling collected has been transformed – which was the fundamental intention of the transition to dual stream.
“Prior to the transition, levels of contamination in our recycling were around 14% – since the switch every single load of recycling has achieved the new contamination thresholds of 1% paper and 5% for glass, cans, and plastic.
“There has been no appreciable increase in residual waste. Over the first 10 weeks of the new service, the average weekly residual tonnage was 650 tonnes – the average for the three months prior to the switch was 760 tonnes per week.
“This suggests that recycled material is not finding its way into the refuse stream.
“The initial sense of chaos experienced by residents through the change from a co-mingling to dual-stream recycling service has now settled.
“While there remain issues that need to be responded to, the service is performing better again and delivering better outputs in terms of improved recycling.
“However, the project implementation involved a period of service disruption that significantly impacted residents and must not be repeated.”
Cllr Liz Little, Lichfield District Council
The report will be discussed at the meeting on 15th September.
