Published: Friday, 9th January, 2009 9:40am

Kerbside glass recycling too expensive - report

by Adam Hewitt

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THE prospect of kerbside glass recycling arriving in Reading borough is fading fast as the recession sets in.

A report by waste officials to the borough council's Environment Scrutiny Panel suggested house-to-house glass collections could cost nearly £1m per year, even without start-up and promotional costs.

Peter Butler, manager of the council's waste collection service, told councillors last week: "We don't think we would gain much for quite a high cost."

The idea has long had political support in principle - it would be more convenient than bottle banks and would cut the amount of glass in landfill sites - but the high cost will almost certainly kill off the idea as the council looks for savings across the board and wish-list projects are abandoned.

Other councils, including West Berkshire, Slough and Windsor, offer a kerbside service but keep costs down by collecting mixed rather than separated glass.

This cannot be directly recycled - unless sent to processing plants for an extra fee, or hand-sorted by waste crews - and instead is usually used as aggregate for road-building and industry.

Lib Dem Ricky Duveen, who chairs the scrutiny panel, said: "We still have an issue with two or three thousand tonnes of glass ending up in landfill, we are breaking our heads trying to find a way of dealing with it."

Borough environment leader Cllr Paul Gittings, forced by other commitments to miss the meeting, said afterwards he was open-minded on the issue, but added: "At the moment I think the costs of introducing kerbside glass recycling are clear and the environmental benefits are at best neutral - we would have to have extra crews to do it, for example."

He said the "halfway house" option of more on-street recycling bins would be investigated, and that the council is increasing the number of bottle banks borough-wide.

The amount of glass collected from bottle banks has already jumped from just under 400 tonnes from April to June 2006, to more than 700 tonnes between July and September this year.

Tory environment spokesman Cllr Tom Stanway said the current system has invisible environmental costs, such as the pollution pumped out by cars on short hops to bottle banks.

The full report is available at: www.tinyurl.com/5n2377