Central areas with communal bins will be the last to have food waste collections in Brighton and Hove, councillors have been told.
Labour councillor Emma Daniel, who represents Central Hove, raised the issue at the cabinet meeting yesterday (Thursday 15 May), saying that she had heard people were concerned that they would not be included.
Labour councillor Tim Rowkins, the council’s cabinet member for net zero and the environment, said that food waste collections would be introduced in four phases. More details about the first and second phases would be announced next month.
Currently, the council plans to start the new service for 11,000 homes in the east of the city from September before extending it to a further 29,000 homes in the north of the city from October.
From November, 31,000 households in the west of the city should start receiving food waste collections, Councillor Rowkins said.
Finally, the 67,000 homes in the centre of Brighton and Hove and those with communal bins would receive the service from March next year.
By the end of March next year, all councils will be expected to have weekly food waste recycling services – a requirement brought in by the Environment Act 2021.
Councillor Rowkins said that the council was following a phased approach to make sure that the environmental services team, known until recently as Cityclean, “learn as they go and get it right”.
Councillor Daniel said: “The feedback I get from areas with communal bins is they feared they might miss out because they want to participate, they want a low-waste economy, they are enthusiastic, but they were worried it wouldn’t work in communal (bin) areas.
“Other people in communal areas are asking, if it is brought into our area and then people abuse it, tip other things, don’t do it properly and it gets contaminated, what assurances can these people have?”
All the new food waste vehicles will have jet-washing units, Councillor Rowkins said, to clear up any mess daily in the case of communal bins.
Councillor Rowkins said: “The central areas are the most difficult to plan for, which is why we’re doing those areas last to make sure that we’ve got the service and whole infrastructure set up and running smoothly before getting the communal bins in.
“One of the areas of concern is around the bins themselves. In communal areas, you’ve got to have a daily collection and a bin that is secure because we all know the foxes and seagulls will get into the bins given the slightest chance.”
Labour councillor Joy Robinson, who also represents Central Hove, said: “This could really help with the horrible problem we have with seagulls.”
Green councillor Pete West said that a new city-wide service was being introduced when the environmental services team was “in deep distress” and unable to manage existing rubbish and recycling collections.
Councillor West said: “Given the scale of the undertaking for Cityclean to successfully implement a whole new collection service for food waste by March 2026, and the complete lack of detail presented in the thin cabinet report on how this will be successfully achieved, are cabinet confident they are showing due diligence and good governance in agreeing a recommendation for the roll-out on the basis of what appears to be effectively handing officers a blank cheque?
“Are we to regard this as a transparent and competent approach to public administration?”
Councillor Rowkins said that there was no “blank cheque” and he was confident that there was oversight in place with a “robust structure of programme and project management”.
He committed to providing regular updates as the service was introduced.
The report to the cabinet said that bringing in food waste collections would cost almost £1.9 million, with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) providing £678,000 and the council putting in £1.2 million a year.
Food waste collection vehicles would be hired initially, with £2.4 million committed from the council’s capital budgets for new lorries.
All homes in the city would receive a five-litre food caddy and a year’s supply of compostable liners, the cabinet was told. People living areas with in kerbside collections would also receive a 23-litre outside food waste bin.
About 10 million tonnes of food is estimated to be wasted across Britain every year, with much sent to landfill.
Labour councillor Mitchie Alexander, the council’s cabinet adviser for community engagement, food insecurity and allotments, said that food waste collection was one of the aims of the new Brighton and Hove Food Strategy.
Councillor Alexander said: “I look forward to a future meeting between us as the council and the (Brighton and Hove) Food Partnership on fully composting our city. As some people will be fully aware, the food partnership overseas a number of small community composting schemes.
“With these small community compost projects and our citywide food waste collection, I think we can really look forward to a whole city circular food waste for the future.”
Councillor Rowkins said that the compost would be generated at a site near Lewes from the collected material and then used in parks and green spaces.
Labour councillor Alan Robins, an allotment holder, asked for any spare compost to be delivered to allotment sites across Brighton and Hove.
Cityclean – a very silly name – was created to “solve” outsourcing disputes but so ingrained were disputes that this made no difference. That is the situation as it stands. If anything, it is worse. As such, it looks as though the council here will fall far short of the national target for reduction in food waste. After all, whatever residents’ efforts in filling the bins correctly, everything turns upon their efficient collection. The best thing is perhaps to ensure that one creates as little waste as possible. For example, the stalk of broccoli is as edible as the rest of it.
The council received £2.4 million in funding from the government to start food waste collections and personally I’m quite worried Brighton council is ill-prepared to get everything running smoothly by the March 2026 legal deadline the government has set all councils to start food waste collection services.
Even with a phased approach starting in September, it doesn’t leave much time for the council to get things working properly before the new national legislation forcing the council to make collections starts. If the council hasn’t been able to sort out the city’s dire recycling rates for the last 25 years, I don’t hold out huge hope that phasing in a whole new collection service over a 6 month period is realistic. The council received the new burdens funding over a year ago, so in theory they could have got things up and running sooner if they really wanted a more realistic lead in time to test things.
Good luck to people lucky enough to live near one of the communal food waste bins!
The problem with recycling rates is that home scalpers have gradually made homes smaller and smaller to the point of having no, or very little storage. so anyone who does recycle just ends up with a crate sat in the middle of their lounge diner filling up with cardboard and plastic with no where for it to go out of sight. Then there’s the problem of having to make two trips, one to carry the landfill waste and another to carry the recycle crate. That’s fine if you live in a two bed semi, but not when you live on a 4th floor conversion with no lift and several fire doors between your front door and the external entrance, and that’s before you’ve even begun your trip to the skip which in many cases isn’t particularly close to your front door and often not even in your road.
I put up with doing it as it encourages routine, and I also like the cycle to the Hove recycle centre but even that is a pain now as we don’t have to get appointments like car users, but we still have to queue up with the cars, belching emissions in my face as they slowly operate their one in, one out policy just so I can get rid of a bucket’s worth of dead electricals to recycle like wires, batteries, broken kettle etc. I struggle to see how they could make it more complicated if they try.
I visit family elsewhere in the country and all they have to do is open their single front door and put it in the wheely bin 2 meters away whatever recycling they had from the previous day, often doing it in their jammies. I’m not sure they would bother if they have to go through the palaver we have to here, and even I, a fully paid up vegan with a very low carbon footprint who’s given up a car after 25 years of motoring for an ebike, wonder if I can be bothered to keep playing this game and one day may just snap and get a bigger kitchen bin and shove it all in the same landfill plastic black sack. Batteries, food, recyclables, unrecyclable, the lot.
I can see how people without my mindset will think nothing of not bothering to recycle and just assume their little bit won’t matter much instead of having some sense of social responsibility.
My guess is that within 6 months Councillors in-boxes will be full of complaints by residents as to lack of collections. Oh yes – the smell of rotting food on a hot summers day, wafting across the ward, not collected for up to two months (like the missed garden waste collections) this spring.
The communal bins are only really in central locations though aren’t they? So surely those collections will work differently to households where they have individual collections, so what is it the council is expecting to learn from the other collections that it will apply to an entirely different type of collection for communal bins.
Reading between the lines it just sounds like the council is nowhere near ready to roll out the communal bins in the city centre, that they know it is likely to be a car crash, and they will only introduce those collections just before the new laws kick in.
How do you compost custard ?Another notion without contacting the residents on their opinions.
A DICTATORSHIP BY A CABINET OF CLOWNS.
The council is folowing the law by having to institute this so hardly a dictatorship!
But what sort of monster has custard leftover in the first place?
Ahh just what everyone wants, rotting food sat in their baking hot flat for a week between collections. Where on earth do they expect people to put the rotting food in the mean time? They realise most of us don’t even have the luxury of a separate kitchen?
This is another boomer idea, they think everyone has front and rear gardens to store things like this, in which case it wouldn’t be needed in the first place.
We specifically don’t put any food waste even in the kitchen bin as it stinks after a couple of days and then requires taking down several flights of stairs and across to the skip. We put it down the toilet instead, where it will become fertiliser at the sewerage plant, and as we’re vegan there’s no fat in there to clog anything up either.
keep mine on the kitchen widow sill
That’s really bad for the toilet and plumbing, Xan. Food waste adds unnecessary organic load to the sewage system. More energy to filter, process, and remove, which causes a higher cost to the wastewater treatment process. That’s reflected in everyone’s water bills.
Hi Xan, It’s must be a tough life, being able to have enough surplus food.
Complete and Utter BS waste of time and money….
keep mine on the kitchen widow sill
Until cityclean can manage to collect our recycling more than once in 6-months, I wouldn’t trust them with anything.
Some of the pack sizes are too large for two of us. However we buy them things like salads, in order to have some variety in our diet. Sometimes don’t eat it all, so this salad/veg type goes in the garden waste bin. It would be good if supermarkets sold packs in smaller sizes, but that might not be cost effective for them. It would take us a good few weeks, or even months to fill a food caddy. In our household, most of the food waste is created by our ageing hound.
Just checked – yet again our garden waste bin hasn’t been emptied (6th time this year) and we’re paying one of the highest rates in the country for this non-service.*
It really doesn’t give one confidence in the council’s ability to actually, make a food waste collection work…
• Before anybody asks – we won’t be renewing the contract again.
Our garden waste bin’s not been collected this week either. I will be renewing it, because I don’t drive, and the alternative would most probably would cost a lot more.