Households in Shrewsbury & Atcham Borough are being hailed for their effort diverting garden waste and cardboard away from landfill via the Councils garden waste / cardboard collection service. The Council has announced that these last few months have rewritten all the record books, with this May just gone, yielding almost 1.5 million kilos! This is officially the best month ever since the service began.
The latest figures show the service collected and sent for composting:
- April 2008 – 734. 02 tonnes
- May 2008 – 1,487. 64 tonnes
- June 2008 – 1,187. 34 tonnes
This means that in the first quarter of this financial year alone, a massive 3, 418 tonnes or 3, 418, 000 kg of garden waste and cardboard has been collected from all over the Borough and sent for composting at a local farm. That’s equivalent in weight to 235 double-decker buses!
Councillor Judith Williams, Portfolio Holder for Recycling in Shrewsbury, commented “I’m chuffed to bits to hear that the service is performing so well. Since we issued the green wheeled bins, we have seen tonnage just take off! It’s a great credit to the public out there, who are helping us to reduce landfill. I am very proud of the crews too, who have worked like Trojans in all sorts of weather to shift this staggering amount of material.
The service is very popular, as cardboard in particular is so bulky. By removing this there’s a real visible difference to the amount of waste the householder has left. It’s important to get garden waste & cardboard away from landfill because they’re biodegradable. In the anaerobic conditions found in landfill sites the material would give off methane as it breaks down, which, as a very potent greenhouse gas, can exacerbate the greenhouse effect. So this highly successful service is playing an important role in fighting global warming”.
All the garden waste & cardboard collected through the service is taken to a local farm near Ford, just outside of Shrewsbury where its matured in wind rows, aerobically, to make high quality compost. For more information on the garden waste collection services in Shrewsbury & Atcham call 01743 281155 email recycling@shrewsbury.gov.uk or visit www.shrewsbury.gov.uk/recycling
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