Huntingdonshire District Council (HDC) wants to work with residents and communities to maximise recycling and minimise the creation of waste across the district with a strong emphasis on the education and awareness of recycling and composting. This reduces the amount of costly landfill and ensures that we can capitalise on the real value of items put out for recycling being fully recyclable.
We will be focusing on key areas, including four projects detailed below:
- Prevention Rather Than Cause – Encouraging zero waste initiatives by working with different community groups to help residents pick alternatives to the norm (eg. Refill shops and repair Cafes)
- Contamination of Recycling – Working closer with crews to ensure that the contamination rejection policy is being strictly adhered to and providing useful feedback to empower both crews and residents to be educated on reducing contamination
- Communal Bins – These can suffer from higher contamination levels due to perceived lack of ownership, working with property management companies to resolve issues and issue revamped communal collection guides
- Communication
- Recycling Presentations – Delivering knowledge to enable residents to waste less and recycle more
- Social Media – an even greater presence on social media channels to drive engagement with and share knowledge around waste minimisation
- Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Waste Partnership – We work with the County Council, all Districts, Cambridge and Peterborough City Council including taking the lead during Recycling Week with information videos.
Councillor Marge Beuttell, Executive Councillor for Operations and Regulation, said: “I am very excited that there are lots of things we can do together to increase the knowledge and awareness of our residents. We can all act on the simple things to reduce our waste and increase our recycling, which goes a long way to supporting the work that we are doing to champion and pioneer our environmental change agenda.
“Our bold manifesto pledge sets out to achieve a 60% recycling rate, therefore reducing landfill and maximising recycling is key. By remembering to wash and squash your recycling, residents can play their part in achieving this target. I am positive that these projects will have an enormous benefit to Huntingdonshire.”
The Council’s Waste Minimisation team already work to encourage a reduction in the amount of waster produced by the District’s residents, but with the help of some newly agreed projects, HDC intends to reduce contamination and increase the percentage of material that is recycled. Included in these projects, are innovative educational efforts to remove barriers that have previously stood in the way of our positive message, such as multilingual educational materials.
