Legislation & Policy

There are a number of policies and laws passed down to local authorities by Central Government and the EU that direct how councils manage waste.

The EU Waste Framework Directive sets a legal requirement for the UK to recycle at least 50% of household waste by 2020. Earlier this year further targets for recycling of 55% by 2025 and 60% by 2030 were introduced. While we may be leaving the EU, our Government has indicated that these targets will remain.

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The Directive ranks how we should deal with waste. The best solution being preventing waste in the first place followed by reuse, then recycling, energy recovery and disposal as a last resort.

Waste Plastic

Plastic has an important role to play in products and packaging. However, the recent Blue Planet II series highlighted the problems caused when plastic waste is not properly disposed of. 

Until recently, a significant portion of UK plastics were sent to China, but the poor quality of the material led to China announcing a ban on imports of plastic waste in January 2018. This has meant the UK recycling industry has had to find other countries that are able to take this waste for recycling.

In July 2018, the National Audit Office – the public spending watchdog – published a report that highlighted the risk that some plastics waste sold for recycling abroad is not recycled under equivalent standards to the UK, and is instead sent to landfill or contributes to pollution.

We have a responsibility as a Council and Swindon community to reduce our use of plastics where possible and to make sure our plastic waste is either recycled correctly or disposed of in a responsible way.

Living within the Council’s financial means

During the last decade the areas where the Council spends its money have changed dramatically as our Central Government funding has dropped, while demand for our statutory children’s and adult's services has increased significantly. In 2018/19, 80% of the Council’s total budget will be spent on supporting vulnerable adults and children, including public health. That compares with 48% ten years ago. The Council has to save a further £30m before 2020 to make sure the budget stays balanced.

Given the challenges described, we have to be realistic in terms of what the Council can do to increase recycling in order to meet the Government targets. 

The Waste Strategy will set out the principles for how we will manage Swindon’s waste, along with some specific measures we will introduce in the first 12 months to improve our recycling rate. We would like to hear from you about these proposals, outlined below.

Temporarily stop collecting plastics separately for recycling

We propose that in the short term residents should put their plastic into their black bins/blue bags and separate plastics collections should stop. The main benefit of returning plastics to the black bin/ blue bags is that we will know exactly where our plastic goes and what happens to it, so there is no risk of it ending up in overseas landfill or worse. This is because we would be able to process the plastic in Swindon, converting it into fuel at Swindon’s solid recovered fuel (SRF) plant in Cheney Manor.

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Another benefit of this approach is that it may increase recycling of other materials like glass, cans and paper/card which are currently put in black bins/blue bags. This would happen because there will be less room in the black bin/blue bags for these materials so residents will be more likely to use their recycling boxes instead.

We do not consider this a long-term solution and when plastic recycling becomes more environmentally-friendly and cost effective, we will consider reintroducing a plastic collection service.

The Government has proposed an initiative to phase out single use plastics, are encouraging bottle recycling via a deposit return scheme and are also encouraging manufacturers to streamline the number, type and recyclability of the various plastics used in packaging. This will take a number of years to have an impact but will make plastic recycling collections more feasible in the future.

Longer term options

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In order to meet the more challenging targets in future we will need to consider how our collection service can be designed to help residents recycle more and throw away less. How we collect general waste and recycling will be considered at the time that our current fleet of vehicles need replacing but we would like your views on which options you would prefer.