Agenda item

Waste Partner Updates

Minutes:

Stratford & Warwick

Julie Lewis informed the partnership that Stratford District were proposing to stop the garden waste collection service for 2 weeks. There were staff shortages due to illness and vacancies, but all services remained running normally. Work was ongoing in the mobilisation of the new joint-contract and conversations are on-going with the County Council on food waste. There were communications ongoing with fly tipping for both districts. Warwick District were addressing issues with student properties, including those not having wheeled recycling bins and needing their waste collected two to three times a week. Warwick District also held a public competition to name their new road sweepers. 

 

Rugby

Dan Green informed the partnership that they were gearing up for Christmas and will suspend garden waste collection for a couple of weeks; residents were made aware of this with bin tags. They had staff shortages. One of the biggest current challenges was collecting from alleyways behind terraced houses as these were becoming unsafe for staff as they badly needed repairing; these alleyways are not vehicle accessible.

 

A litter picking campaign will start soon and an online campaign to gain interest will start soon too. Rugby Borough qualified for some levelling up funding through their IT department to look at digitalising in their waste collection information and providing better information for customer service colleagues so they could help residents who ring up. Dan Green will report back once the plan has been developed.

 

Nuneaton & Bedworth

Glen McGrandle informed the partnership that they had a successful recruitment drive to fill their staff vacancies for refuse collectors and they should start in early 2022. The Omicron variant was being monitored in case it affected their resources. The garden waste collection service subscription was now live, and the placement scheme with Oakwood went well too. Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough will evaluate an enforcement contract that expires in January 2022 and this will be awarded to third party provider. Work was going well with waste crime and detection as well. Covid-19 signage was on the refuse vehicles. All Christmas and New Year campaigns media briefings had gone out to notify residents. The climate change group was ongoing to hopefully cut their carbon footprint in the future.

 

North Warwickshire

Richard Dobbs informed the partnership that North Warwickshire were also preparing for Christmas and they suspended their garden waste collection for a month. They were still having issues with HGV driver shortages, so a review was undertaken to align themselves better with what the market was providing. North Warwickshire were the winners of the national Best Performing Refuse Service and the Most Improved Transport Fleet Maintenance. They were also looking at powering their vehicles on hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO).

 

The Chair and Dan Green noted that Coventry’s refuse collectors were due to go on strike over pay conditions.

 

Warwickshire

Ruth Dixon informed the partnership that they were making sure that they were fully staffed for Christmas as well as having working provisions in place for safe working with Covid-19. There will be two editions of the newsletter around Christmas this year due to the amount of information in them. Ruth committed to circulating the links for the newsletters and these are laid out below:

 

 

Residents were still signing up for ‘Slim Your Bin’ and Warwickshire County officers visited 12 schools or did virtual assemblies, those who signed up got new leaflets or emails to go out to parents. Home composting bin sales were going well, and they sold double the amount of green Johannas in 2021 than 2020, possibly because of green waste charging. Green Johannas were sold equally across the county. Contract award letters for the road sweeper and gully contract were sent out and it was scheduled to start in January 2022.

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