Meeting hears Welsh city ranks highly party because of a ‘brave’ black bag decision

Richard Youle – Local democracy reporter 

The best recycling city in Wales has been revealed and its success is partly due to a “brave” decision to limit the number of black bags people can put out, councillors have been told.

Swansea Council’s current recycling rate is 70.5%, a fraction above the Wales-wide target of 70% for 2024-25.

A scrutiny meeting heard that Swansea’s recycling rate is in the top five of Wales’ 22 authority areas but highest in terms of cities.

And the way it collects and deals with waste is among the best performing cost-wise.

Household waste

“Swansea is the lead city for recycling in Wales, if not the UK, and that’s something to be proud of,” said Rachel Jowitt, head of corporate services and waste.

She said the ease of the recycling system in Swansea helped, and added: “Swansea was one of the first to bring in a three-bag limit (for non-recyclable rubbish). That was a huge, brave step to really force residents to put the recycling out.”

The council collects around 70,000 tonnes of recyclable waste per year from outside people’s homes, from businesses and from the county’s household waste recycling centres.

Scrutiny

The waste is taken to the baling plant at Llansamlet where the council pays to have the circa 34,500 tonnes of food and garden waste taken away and dealt with, but earns money by selling the remaining 35,500 tonnes of material, such as glass, paper, tins, plastics, ceramics and wood.

The council’s service improvement, regeneration and finance scrutiny panel heard that each material had a bespoke market and that a recent surge in oil price would affect prices for plastic, which contains oil.

Ms Jowitt said the council maximised the use of medium to long-term contracts of three to five years to help provide financial security. She added that the authority also sought “good end destinations” and had to prove to regulator Natural Resources Wales that the materials had been recycled.

While councillors welcomed Swansea’s strong recycling performance the question was raised, not for the first time, about why people had to travel to the Llansamlet household waste recycling centre in the east of the city to dispose of wood.

Bonfires

Cllr Lynda James asked why a wood skip couldn’t be provided at the Clyne household waste recycling centre in Derwen Fawr. “I do know many people just burn the wood, they have bonfires in their garden rather than having to travel across the city, which is a waste of the wood which could add to the recycling rates,” she said.

Ms Jowitt, who is new to her role, said she hadn’t yet visited all of Swansea’s waste recycling centres, but that from her understanding some of them were quite constrained in size and that the cost of collecting extra skips had to be factored in.

She also said wood brought to the Llansamlet site included treated and painted timber, MDF, and that some had nails in it. She added that the major wood reprocessor used by the council, in Crewe, was sometimes at full capacity.

She said the Welsh Government had been trying to set up a national contract to stimulate home-grown wood reprocessing in Wales. She said wood was “such a difficult material to recycle”.

A report before the panel said people wanted to put more kinds of materials out for recycling. Ms Jowitt said the early feedback from a trial allowing residents to put out soft plastics like crisp packets in some parts of Swansea was “really positive”.

Panel convenor Cllr Chris Holley said he would like to know if the council had a bond with materials’ reprocessors because, he claimed, some companies had gone bust in the past owing the council a lot of money.