Powys 'not doing enough' to reach recycling targets

By Elgan Hearn, Local Democracy Reporter

Powys County Council could be fined £100,000 for failing to hit the Welsh Government’s 70% recycling target for this year.

At a meeting of the council’s Economy, Residents and Communities scrutiny committee on Monday, councillors sifted through the draft Powys Sustainable Resource Strategy.

This strategy will be put out to a three-month “engagement process” early next year which will allow residents to have their say on how waste and recycling will be run in the county up to 2030.

Councillors were told that using the words “waste” and “recycling” in the title of the document would be old-fashioned.

It is also a document that will help the council put together future business cases for Welsh Government funding to make sure that its facilities are “up to spec” for the future and able to handle more recycling.

The document already outlines that there could be fewer black rubbish bin collections, and people who don’t recycle their rubbish could eventually be fined.

Senior waste and recycling manager Ashley Collins said: “Significant progress has already been made in 2013/2014 the recycling rate was 52.5%.

“Last year (2023/2024), the official figure was 68.1%, we’re hoping to get over 69% this year which is slightly shy of the 70% target, but it’s still showing a really good increase.”

The report explained that based on last year’s 68.1% recycling figure the council would have been fined around £200,000 by the Welsh Government. The fine is £200 per tonne beneath the 70% target

Mr Collins said: “Wales is second in the world and Powys is sixth or seventh in Wales at the moment, there’s only about four or five that are going to hit the 70%, the rest are doing everything they possibly can to reach that target.”

He explained that taking away the frequency of black “residual waste” bin collections had “increased” the recycling rate.

Mr Collins said that a “waste composition analysis” from 2022 shows that 45% of the waste residents put into the black bin could be recycled.

A breakdown of this figures shows that: 20% is food waste, 11% could have gone into the kerbside recycling boxes, a further 11% could have been taken to the HWRC (Household Waste Recycling Centre) and 3% is garden waste.

Mr Collins added: “We have to get to that and it’s one of the main drivers of the strategy and food waste is a really big one.

“We collect it every week, why would anyone want to put it in the residual (black) bin for it to sit there for weeks. It’s money going up in flames.”

Figures by Stats Wales which also include composting rates show that Powys comes ninth of the 22 local authorities.

Powys also comes in as joint ninth in the MyRecycling Wales local authority table.

The public “engagement” exercise is set to start on January 10.