The Council has now published a table showing the amount of waste recycled/composted each quarter for the last 5 years.
The table (click here) reveals that the lowest level of composting and recycling recorded occurred during the period Oct – Mar 2014.
This coincided with the period when the Labour led council stopped green waste collections
Council performance stats click to access full report
A Council report has revealed that the amount of waste going to landfill in the City is significantly increasing.
As a result York taxpayers face a £3,918,960 bill – up over 17% on budget forecasts.
The fall in performance comes only weeks after a change in collection arrangements brought chaos to some streets in York.
The position is likely to deteriorate further over the winter as the Council is stopping collecting green waste altogether. The winter months accounted for around 18% of this type of waste last year.
The fear is that most of this will now go to landfill.
Historic recycling rates in York. Click to enlarge
During the period when the Liberal Democrats led the council the amount of recycling and green waste sent for composting had substantially increased each year.
Now, against a background of delays on the longer term Allerton Park waste treatment project, prospects look increasingly bleak for both taxpayers and environmentalists in the City.
Asked, at the last Council meeting, to apologise to those residents whose bins were not emptied on time, Cllr Levene refused to do so.
Instead he claimed that only 0.12% of collections had been missed.
He conveniently forgot that 90% of residents did not have changes to their collection days.
Last Christmas some bins weren’t emptied for nearly 3 weeks and, although there have been fewer missed collections this week, the holiday season could being more problems.
Green waste collection stops at the end of the month.
Bins in Foxwood
Cllr Levene protestations were undermined by a fellow Cabinet member who, in response to a separate question about delays in answering at the Councils call centre, said,
“the significant increase in calls week beginning 9th September were due in the main to the waste collection changes affecting a large proportion of residents in York.
Clearly original estimates of resources needed to meet demand had to be re-evaluated once the real impacts were known, and then adjusted”.
The Cabinet member went on to say that
“We aim to answer 80% of our calls within 20 seconds with 95% of calls being answered”.
This compared to the actual performance, in early September, when average waiting times were 2.5 minutes with 40% of calls being abandoned.
