At the last Full Council meeting of Bury Council I asked about the ‘start-up’ costs of the new three-weekly bin collection system. I know a lot of us experienced extra bin collections at the weekend, and a number of people had asked how much this was costing:

Councillor T Pickstone
Could the Leader please provide members with a breakdown of the estimated set up costs for the new three-weekly bin collection service? Could this include:
– additional costs of communications with residents
– set up costs of the new texting service
– addition staff and related costs as a result of the additional weekend collections – provision of additional and replacement larger bins to residents
– capital and other costs associated with the new service.

Answer
The costs to set up the new bin collection service were approved by Cabinet in July 2014 when it considered the Zero Waste Strategy. A budget of £213,400 was approved for the capital costs of new bins and caddies to meet estimated demand for additional bins for larger families and extra recycling bins. One-off implementation costs of £189,700 were approved to cover information packs for residents and one-off tasks such as delivering extra bins, missed bin collections, recycling promotions and extra contact centre staff to answer residents’ queries.

On top of this extra collections were organised for some residents to ensure that there wasn’t an excessive delay between the collections on the old and new bin rounds. This incurred a one-off cost of around £55,000 for staff, fuel, supervision and printing and distribution of leaflets. The set up of the new alert system was done in-house by staff in our ICT section so this has not cost us any extra money. As the alerts are sent by email (not by text) there are no ongoing costs.

Whilst the implementation costs appear to be substantial the savings on payments for waste disposal from the increased recycling which we expect to achieve are estimated to be £890,000 per annum, giving a pay back period of just 6 months.

As a follow on I asked how many people who had small grey bins, had already asked for them to be replaced by a larger bin – the answer was 700 households so far.

In summary that is £458,100 set up costs + 700 replacement bins so far.