Hi,

Is anyone else weary about the low numbers, who have signed up for garden waste recycling?
4000(+a bit), in a borough of over 294,000 residents.
Yes, I know many don't have own gardens but, the numbers still seem very low
Are we Lewisham residents beng sold shot again??
Neighbouring borough Southwark, have green waste as part of the normally (inclusive, council tax costs basics).
Just a question.
Cab anyone add to this?

I don't think people take much care of their gardens these days. Certainly our neighbour has gone for the wild (read abandoned) look. :-)

This post was last modified: 03-05-2016 09:08 AM by Londondrz.

Based on your figures that translates to about 1% of households in the borough. The council have taken in an extra £240,000 so they'll be happy although whoever got the contract for garden waste re-cycling is going to be disappointed.

Is that figure of 249,000 households or residents?

To answer my own question, there are 116,000 households. Of those some will have no garden, and / or will share bins with other households in the same building. So it's not possible to work out what percentage that 4,000 represents without more information.

I doubt if the service can be run for £240,000 per year.

It's not as simple as looking at what people have paid for the service and translating that into pure income to run the service. The bins themselves need to be paid for, first off. Secondly, the whole collection regime is being changed. The costs of the garden service are part of a much wider reorganisation, where costs for some things will be set off against savings in others.

samulsen - Why would Lewisham be contracting out any part of this service? They already collect green waste from both households and from street cleaning. All they are changing is the way it is collected, from a bespoke bag collection to regular bin collection.

Does anyone know where Lewisham's green waste goes? I found a couple of interesting sites about municipal composting in north London:

- how it's made at the EcoPark in north London and a post in the comments section, dated 2012, from Lewisham Gardens saying that Lewisham (at that time) gave their green waste to a parks management company who in turn sold it to a large composting company:

http://www.verticalveg.org.uk/municipal-...ood-thing/

- the EcoPark's own website with an animated explanation of the composting process and a video too:

http://www.londonwaste.co.uk/community/compost/

So if it is 116.000 households rather than 249,000 residents, the take up of approx 4000 households works out to approx 3% of households. At £60 per household that's £240,000.

But we don't know how many of those 116,000 households wouldn't take a green waste bin because they have no garden. The only significant percentage is of potential uptake, not all households.

Yes, they've taken £240,000. They've also bought and distributed thousands of bins. And will be doing new collections. I'm just saying it's not all profit in their pockets.

Agreed. I'm not saying it's all profit, in fact, I predict with a 3% take up it's going to be a loss leader for the council or for who will be collecting the waste.

Having recently moved into SE23 we will miss the "on demand" green bag service. It's been really useful in saving us trips to the tip with a car full of vegetation. Now we've cut everything back we won't generate enough garden waste regularly to need ANOTHER wheelie bin in our tiny front garden.