East Riding Council set to save money from household waste sites
It's set to save £110,000 after residents' passes were introduced last year
East Riding Council is set to save £110,000 on waste disposal after residents’ passes were introduced last year, according to estimates.
East Riding Council’s Environment and Regeneration Overview and Scrutiny Sub-Committee heard the savings followed a drop in tip use since the pass was introduced in October.
Councillors heard an estimated 12 per cent of tip users previously came from outside the East Riding, with the proportion as high as 19 per cent at the Airmyn site.
It comes as a report to the committee stated the passes had saved around £25,000 in one month since their introduction.
The report also stated waste tonnages disposed of at the East Riding’s 10 tips fell by 22.78 per cent year-on-year, from 3988.23 in November 2020 to 3,079.682.
Council waste lead Paul Tripp said the passes meant people in the East Riding were no longer subsidising the disposal of waste from tip users outside the area.
Councillors also heard waste teams were looking to boost recycling rates, with around 30 per cent of rubbish put in black bins able to be recycled.
Council waste disposal service manager Sarah Atkinson said moves were also underway to get people to properly separate recyclable from non-recyclable waste before disposing of it.
The officer added there were plans to provide gloves, hand sanitiser and other equipment to allow tip users to separate waste when they arrive.
Ms Atkinson said: “We’ve had a good few months of the residents passes now, the first thing we saw was that Hull City Council changed opening ours for their tips to seven days a week from five.
“We’ve seen a real reduction in traffic at tips, particularly those on the border with other authorities, and the tonnage of waste collected has fallen.
“Airmyn was the site most used by people from outside the East Riding and that’s where we’ve seen the biggest decreases.
“Disposals of soil and rubble have also massively dropped at Airmyn, sites in North Yorkshire tend to charge for it but we don’t.
“We’ve had very few comments or complaints about the passes, we’ve had some people ask if they can get another one because when they received theirs they didn’t know what it was and threw them away.
“We think the Weel site is due for an update, it’s very small and there’s drainage issues there so we’ll be looking at moving it to another site.
“If we introduced charges we’d have to put a lot of new infrastructure on sites to make sure they could take payments.
“Some of the more rural sites are in areas that wouldn’t have enough internet coverage for card payments.
Mr Tripp said the savings made since the passes were introduced came as the council’s waste disposal budget was under a lot of pressure.
Mr Tripp said: “We’re looking at all available options for Weel’s relocation, it’s on an aged site which doesn’t lend itself to a modern facility.
“I’m hopeful that as we move forward we can find a new site for Beverley which is rapidly expanding.
“We’ve never really explored charging non-residents, it would cost a lot of time for officers to look into it.”