Landfill stagnant while recycling declined after regime brought in
By Iain Gray
HAS Ards and North Down Council’s controversial booking system for Household Recycling Centres (HRCs) actually made any practical difference?
That’s the question being asked this week after new figures showed the amount of rubbish the council sends to landfill is at a virtual standstill – and its recycling rate got worse after the booking system was brought in.
The appointments-only regime started running last autumn, brought in to tackle a long-running crisis in the council’s rubbish collections that saw it go from having one of the best recycling rates in Northern Ireland to one of the worst.
Newly published figures covering January, February and March of this year show that compared to same period in 2023:
•the total amount of rubbish collected was down less than 2%
•although HRCs received 652 tonnes less waste, almost half of that figure was eaten up by a 302-tonne rise in kerbside rubbish collections
•the landfill rate was essentially stagnant, reading a negligible fall of 0.2%
•recycling was down 0.8%.
In the first few months of last year, the council was running ID checks at HRCs to make sure only Ards and North Down locals were using them, though officials later admitted they weren’t always carried out and brought in the booking system instead.
Council environment director David Lindsay has maintained that the appointments-only regime has already proved its worth by reducing the amount of waste coming in at HRCs.
But with half of that cancelled out by the rise in kerbside collections and the council’s landfill rate falling by just 0.2% after the booking system was introduced, many will now question whether the controversial regime is actually making any real difference.
A council spokesman sought to downplay the new statistics, arguing that annual figures look rosier and ‘provide a clearer picture of trends’.
Properly verified provincewide annual figures for the 2023/24 period aren’t going to be available until November; in any case, they would cover a time both before and after the HRC booking system came in, meaning it wouldn’t be possible to check the regime’s direct impact from that yearly report.
But the council spokesman still insisted that the annual figures show a good performance for Ards and North Down, including what he said was an overall rise in recycling despite the January through March decline.
He also claimed that Northern Ireland as a whole saw a slight drop in its recycling rate over the course of the year, while Ards and North Down’s figures improved.
Said the spokesman: “[The council] remains committed to increasing the recycling rate, and the HRC online booking system is one of the key initiatives that is recognised as having an important contribution to help achieve this target.
“Future service transformation initiatives are planned to deliver further improvements in our borough recycling rate, such as the introduction of a new kerbside textile recycling collections service.
“[The council] is under a legal obligation to meet a recycling target of 70% by 2030. These initiatives will help achieve that target while also having a positive impact on the financial burden of waste disposal for ratepayers.”
The booking regime has been controversial from the very beginning, not least as Ards and North Down Council is the only local authority in Northern Ireland to demand its residents navigate a mandatory appointments system to throw out their rubbish.
Officials have previously confirmed that over the same period the new figures cover, 42 people were banned from HRCs for using them too much.
All those bans were subsequently overturned after the locked-out residents were able to prove they were making legitimate visits.
And several houses on the Ards Peninsula don’t appear on a database the council uses for the booking system, meaning those residents are de facto barred from using all nine of the borough’s HRCs.
David Lindsay has sought to downplay those issues, insisting the booking system works well for the overwhelming majority of locals and is doing its job by reducing the amount of rubbish dumped at HRCs.
