Thousands of tonnes of rubbish collected for recycling ends up being incinerated instead, a campaigner said in a petition to Brighton and Hove City Council.
Robert Jones-Mantle, who ran the Magpie Green Box service, presented the petition to a meeting of the full council at hove Town Hall yesterday (Thursday 30 January).
Mr Jones-Mantle, co-founder of the community recycling company, urged the council to take a “no politics and no profiteering” approach to waste collections.
His petition, on the Change.org website, was headed Clean Air Clean Streets and said that 700 out of 3,000 tonnes of recycling ended up being incinerated in the first quarter of 2023.
In the final quarter, the proportion of waste being burnt had risen to a third, the petition said.
In 30 years of the Green Box service, longer than the council’s own recycling set up, Magpie had reached a peak of 80 per cent of its collections being recycled.
Magpie also picked up a wider variety of plastics and other recyclables, rejected by the council, but the Green Box service ended last month.
Mr Jones-Mantle told councillors: “The Brighton and Hove wasteful recycling issues aren’t going to be successfully tackled without a unified local approach.
“No politics and no profiteering. For the city and owned by the city. For households and for local businesses.
“There are alternative city-made solutions being intentionally or deliberately overlooked and these are due an explanation of why they’ve been shunned and sabotaged.
“Some residents are making their own solutions who are not supported for being the community champions they are.”
Labour cabinet member Tim Rowkins said that he had been a Green Box subscriber and was disappointed when it closed.
The cabinet member for net zero and environmental services said that recycling services should be available free of charge – and the council was committed to operating an in-house service.
But he promised to meet Mr Jones-Mantle to discuss opportunities for a community project for elements of recycling.
Councillor Rowkins announced changes to the council’s recycling service, adding plastic pots, trays and tubs, aluminium foil and trays and food and drink cartons to what could be left for kerbside collection.
He said that the Greens had twice run the council and each time had “perpetuated a myth” that the recycling contract signed by Labour in 2003 could not be changed.
He also announced a £1.2 million a year food waste collection service.
Councillor Rowkins said: “These major changes will be a shot in the arm for our long-suffering recycling rates and will significantly reduce the amount of waste going into the city’s refuse bins.
“Let the record show that while the Green Party’s position on expanding recycling is that it can’t be done, the Labour position is, well, we’ve done that. What’s next on the list?”
Green councillor Pete West, who was shocked by the end of the “much-loved” Magpie Green Box scheme, asked if the council would set up a subscription scheme for “super-recyclers”.
Councillor Rowkins said that the council was not planning to start a paid-for service, adding that comprehensive recycling should be available to all residents.
I believe it’s a lot less recycling than this, a friend works in hollingbury city clean and as there are economic restrictions a lot of the stuff just goes to Landfill.
There were allegations about recycling being sent for incineration in 2017, then further claims in 2019, and these claims keep coming up.
It feels like it’s hard to ever get to the bottom of any of these issues because the council never seem to be as open and transparent as they make out. Just look at the bullying and harassment issues back in 2018/2019 too – if meetings had not been held behind closed doors and there had of been public scrutiny of that debacle, perhaps there wouldn’t have been another 4-5 years of abuse faced by staff, and residents would have had a better service too.
I hate to think how much money has been wasted over the years on reports looking into various allegations, which them seem to sit and gather dust and not be acted on.
The 2003 Contract is and has been for a number of years “not fit for purpose” and should be cancelled, or renegotiated to reflect recycling in 2025 and going forward. In addition, I’d be interested in seeing the
Emissions statistics for the Newhaven Incinerator, are they compliant with current Regulations?
It was a Labour council in 2017 who blamed the contract on poor recycling rates in the city. They created the “myth” they now say is not true.
Why then did the Labour council in 2017 blame the contract in a letter they sent to the Secretary of State when she asked them to explain poor recycling rates in the city. Either Labour weren’t being honest in their letter to the SoS back in 2017, or they are not being honest now.
The council are expanding the material they are recycling because national laws werer introduced in 2021 (the Env Act) which means councils EVERYWHERE in the country need to collect the same materials by March 2026 and introduce food waste collections.
There’s something very unsavourary about the way Labour are packaging up national law changes and trying to pass them of as something they are doing out of choice here.
On Magpie – who are brilliant, why didn’t the council liaise with them ahead of making changes to there service. I cannot believe there would not have been ways for them to co-exist, with the council expansing its services so they meet the new NATIONAL legal duties they have, while Magpie could have complimented council provision given the work they ensure that what is collected gets recycycled through reliable end chains.
No pun intended – but the whole thing stinks!
Check out Friends of Greenbox on Facebook or the petition
Cityclean provide a paid for recycling service to businesses. Greenbox is the ideal paid for solution for those who work at home or have very small businesses. Their surpluses helped Shabitat. Veolia surpluses just help the greedy
Incinerating to generate electricity is preferable to sending to landfill.
You clearly haven’t seen recent reports on it.
20 years ago it may well have been cited that incineration was better option than landfill, but with more and more plastic waste being produced in our homes and then ending up being incinerated, scientists now say it’s a disaster for climate and that “burning household rubbish in giant incinerators to make electricity is now the dirtiest way the UK generates power.”
Like others in this thread point out it’s baffling how Labour councillors are passing off national changes to improve recycling rates in the UK like it’s their own idea. EVERYWHERE has to uniform what it collects and because Brighton and Hove lag behind other places in the country and collect such limited plastic, they need to correct this.
My understanding of what Magpie do is they ensure that a high percentage of what plastic is collected does not get incinerated, so very sad the council haven’t found a way to support them continuing.
Recycling or burning for electricity is good, look at Denmark, central furnace for all burnable rubbish re-distributed as heat for homes with quite a lot of households connected to the system, the only left over is the slack which is sent to landfill, at the same time other recycling schemes are in place, but not going to happen In England where everyone and their garden gnome gets in the way with a 200 year debate and no result.
Brighton and Hove waste that is not recycled already goes to the Newhaven incinerator to generate electricity. Very little goes to landfill.
See https://www.southdowns.veolia.co.uk/facilities/newhaven-energy-recovery-facility
Check out Friends of Greenbox on Facebook or the petition
Cityclean provide a paid for recycling service to businesses. Greenbox is the ideal paid for solution for those who work at home or have very small businesses. Their surpluses helped Shabitat. Veolia surpluses just help the greedy
Isn’t that the Council’s deal with Veolia for 30 years?
Sell them Brighton and Hove’s rubbish and they burn it all at Newhaven to create electricity for 44,000 homes?
I have never seen any recycling.
The amount of contaminated recycling is extremely high in Brighton. People put stuff in the recycling that shouldn’t be in there. And it ends up getting tipped in regular landfill/incinerator pile. People need to hold a mirror up and look at how they use the bins before blaming the collection
Pizza boxes are a classic one. If they have any grease stains, they can’t go in.
They go in my log burner ! – free heat..
It would help if the council sent out an information about what can and can’t be recycled again, particularly since this seems to have been changed with no notice unless you look it up. We have a large population of quite a transient nature here by way of students, but also people do tend to come and go a lot here anyway, probably largely due to the cost of living here vs wages, which is a whole other conversation, but it means there’s new people here a lot who could also do with informing about the very restrictive recycling here.