You may be aware, if you’ve looked in the right places, that the Council have been running “Recycling Roadshows” recently, although Eastcote doesn’t seem to have figured. I was going to provide a link to their website with the latest ones, but I now see the last one advertised is today (as I write), so I’ve missed the boat – sorry.
Thanks however to Cllr Becky Haggar, who attended one a couple of weeks ago at the Duck Pond Market and sent us some information about it.
High on the list was LBH’s recently-introduced change to the food waste recycling scheme. Food waste is now collected separately from garden waste – had you spotted the new vehicles? – and then undergoes an anaerobic digestion process to produce bio-methane gases for electricity generation.
An eye-catching fact passed on by Cllr Haggar is a reference from resource efficiency experts WRAP, that if everyone in London recycled one banana skin today, we could turn that into enough energy to charge 16,616,738 mobile phones.
Apparently, on average, food waste makes up 40% of black bag waste by weight. I’m not sure whether that’s for Hillingdon or nationwide, but the figure is far too high. All that waste is the eventual source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is many times more potent than carbon dioxide (apparently 25 times or 86 times, depending on the timeframe – that’s far too complicated for me, but you see the point) so it’s really a VERY GOOD IDEA to recycle food waste, and it’s really NOT THAT DIFFICULT.
The way the collection system works hasn’t changed, and it’s all here:
https://www.hillingdon.gov.uk/food-waste .
The textile collection system has also changed, but you’ll have to wait for that one – I’ve probably already written too much for one news item!