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Full Page B200H Final Rev 1 17 February 2014 16:34:31 FOOD WASTE Food waste pioneer The Somerset Waste Partnership has established successful separate food waste collections. Strategy and communications leader David Mansell explains how. omerset Waste Partnership (SWP) was the first local authority in the UK to introduce large-scale separate food waste collections, with roll-outs starting in 2004. We built on earlier tri- als by Avon Friends of the Earth in Bath and by ECT Recycling in West London. Our food waste collections were intro- duced as part of a package of new ser- vices, called Sort It. These involved fortnightly recycling collections, using boxes, moving to weekly and weekly refuse collections moving to fortnightly, with 180-litre wheeled bins provided as standard. For food waste, we provided 5L kitchen caddies, which had been devel- oped to our specification by Straight, and 25L external bins with handles and lockable lids. The new arrangements were a big suc- cess and picked up a number of awards. As the new services rolled out, recycling more than doubled, with food waste con- tributing 90kg per household per year, and residual waste (refuse and cleansing) nearly being halved to 370kg/hh/yr. Another welcome change was a sig- nificant fall in the total amount of waste put out for kerbside collections, which reduced by 16% to an average of 746kg/ hh/yr. Waste analysis showed the big- gest falls were in food and garden waste, which were believed to be due to people cutting back on food waste, more home composting, some moisture loss with the new collection systems and more garden waste being taken to recycling centres. By 2006, our Sort It collections had been rolled out in three Somerset dis- tricts and served over 160,000 house- holds. We chose not to provide com- postable liners because of the cost, instead encouraging the use of newspa- per to wrap food waste or line caddies and making arrangements for composta- ble liners to be supplied for sale by local shops. We later allowed any composta- ble liners to be used, as supermarkets stocked their own brands and other suppliers entered the market. In 2009, we undertook trials with our contractor at the time, ECT Recycling, to test the addition of plastic bottles and cardboard to the collections, which led to the development of a new single pass vehicle, collecting food waste and dry recyclables with kerbside sorting. The new Sort It Plus service was rolled out to all five Somerset districts and now serves over 230,000 households. Originally, food waste was processed at an in-vessel composting facility set- up for the purpose in South Somerset, near Castle Cary. However, the quantity collected soon exceeded its capacity and food waste was also exported out-of- county for processing, including to the Greenfinch anaerobic digestion plant in Ludlow, for which we were the largest supplier for several years. Now we have awarded a contract to strategic disposal partner Viridor for anaerobic digestion at a new plant, built alongside a landfill site at Walpole near Bridgwater. Initially, this will have a 30,000 tonne capacity with about two- thirds being supplied by SWP. This facil- ity is already processing all of our food waste and is nearing the end of its com- missioning process. Biogas from the anaerobic digestion process will initially be used to generate electricity and is expected to produce about 9,500 MWh a year, with about a fifth used within the plant and nearly four-fifths exported to the grid, which is enough to power more than local 1,700 homes. The digestate is dried and this biofertiliser sold to local farmers. In the future, consideration will be given to using the biogas to fuel collec- tion vehicles or to inject into the gas mains, which would give even greater energy and carbon-saving benefits. Since the 2008 credit crunch, house- holds have wasted less food, which has led to a small but on-going decline in collection yields. Austerity effects were apparent with our final Sort It Plus roll-outs. As the period of austerity has continued, there is some evidence that householders are less willing to buy compostable liners, which has led to a very small amount of food waste being diverted back into refuse. This is obvi- ously a concern and we are planning trials with WRAP to reverse this trend. These will include the provision of free plastic liners, which we believe will be easier to remove at the start of the anaer- obic digestion process than compostable liners, which cannot be digested in any case. So, over the last ten years, food waste collections have become an important and established part of Somerset's col- lection services, but challenges still remain. S April 2014 Local Authority Waste & Recycling 17 Viiridor's Bridg- water AD plant in Somerset

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