18th June 2025, Park Regis, Birmingham

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Transcript:

 Good morning everyone. Thank you for having me today just to get my bearings with the technology. So, my name’s Kay Bozeman. I’ve worked in waste now for about 15 years, but I actually started in the, the Garden waste Service. So graduated from university in 2009, straight into the big recession, and they went, there’s no jobs available.

Don’t even try. And I ended up getting a job at the local council, just as a researcher doing surveys and focus groups. And, uh, to be honest, I found it really dull and thought I’m leaving council work. I never want to, don’t want to stay in this industry. It’s terrible. And then my degree background was, uh, environment, so I was trying to get over into the, um, the.

Environmental services sector, which was a lot of bins. And I kept going for jobs and getting rejected. And then luckily for me, they brought in the, uh, the changes that meant that you could charge for garden waste. And the council introduced the charge that I worked for at the time, um, and didn’t really put any prep into it.

Just introduced the charge. And as you can imagine, it tanked massively. And then they released a job called the Garden Waste Officer, which was not much above minimum wage. And the job description was. Come and kind of be the fall guy for this thing that we’ve done and try and sort it out. And the rumor around the council was this job was called the poison chalice.

And they were like, whoever gets it, you know, they’re not gonna last is gone. And I thought, great, there’s my way in. Um, and I applied for the job, got the job just on enthusiasm and I think there wasn’t much hope of any kind of success from that. But there was, I got the bug, we sorted the problems out and I was kind of really, you know, baptism of fire into the world of garden waste.

So my journey for garden waste, uh, started back then with the introduction of that charge and has kind of moved from them, um, into more of a waste world generally. But I just wanted to kind of reminisce for those of you who are in the room and remember that very terrifying time about when we introduced the charges and, and how stressful it was.

coming more forward to today, what I want to do is just generally set the sea about the waste landscape. Um. Um, as you work in waste, you’ll probably know that around 2018, the government made a big announcement around the Environment Act and a new set of, uh, proposals that were going to come into effect at this point, we didn’t know when.

and they released some big consultations on, I think they, they called it consistent collections. It’s now Simpler Recycling, DRSA, deposit return scheme, and EPR, the extended producer, uh, responsibility. So the idea that the producer pays. These have gone through many changes, many frustrating changes, many, many consultations back and forwards, and lots of discussion with industry.

no doubt that you’ve been involved in that in some way. Um, but the most recent iteration, the one that we’re going forward with, came out, I think about November, 2024, and this announced that consistent collections were gonna be. Now known as Simpler Recycling to make it simpler, which, which always helps.

And the majority of the changes from Resident for Residents were gonna come in from the 31st of March, 2026. As part of this, there was gonna be mandated weekly food waste collections. Um, and there was some talk about changing the garden waste to making it free. But luckily they, they scrapped that. But there was, um, the option now for authorities to co-mingle it with food, but it would mean they would have to collect it weekly.

Just out of curiosity, does anybody in the room co-mingle their food waste and garden waste. And do you charge for the service? No. No. And do you currently collect it weekly or fortnightly? So you’re doing it weekly, so not much to change for you? Excellent. Also as part of those simpler recyclings, they obviously mentioned that paper and card had to be removed from the, uh, dry mix recycling.

Do again, do authorities, do you collect your paper and card separately? Do you know? Yeah, no, those that don’t. Are you considering it or are you just filling in that tea form? It’s even it, aren’t we? Yeah. Okay. Brilliant. And plastic films from 2027, and that’s a fun one, I think. Not really much of an end market yet that I’m aware of for that one, but we’re, we are learning about that one now.

So hopefully by the time we get to 2027 and we’ve put all this infrastructure in place to collect them, we’ll know what we’re gonna do with them. I’m excited for that. So the next one, DRS deposit return scheme. Any thoughts on this one in the room? I am, I’m not personally a massive fan. I think we have a great curbside collection already.

The idea of charging people an extra 20,30p on the cans of pop and bottles of water to take ’em back to the supermarket when we can already do a lot with it. And excluding glass, um, in, in this country, excluding glass, which is probably the most sensible material we could put into a DRS. Um, it’s on all containers from 150 milliliter up to three liters, and the deadline has been pushed back again to October, 2027.

So we’ll have to see if that happens. And EPR. The producer pays we should all, I think, have had our first payments with, which is exciting. They weren’t ring-fenced though. Anybody’s authorities ring-fenced them to waste or if they just chucked them into the general budget. A lot of people I know are chucked them into the general budget, um, which is quite alarming, isn’t it?

Because it comes with that target of we need to improve our recycling rates. If you’re in the bottom 10% within your group, they’ll. They can reduce your payments by up to 20%. So, um, for authorities who have taken that money and put it to cover all those areas of the deficit, they may face issues further down the line.

So the general waste landscape at the minute is a little bit testing, but I think it’s quite exciting. As I said, waste for 15 years, massive changes. This is, this is really great as a, as you can see, as a waste enthusiast. I think this, not everybody probably feels the same way. Oh no, my slides disappeared.

I can, I think I can make it up. It’s all right. I can just talk. It’s okay. So the evolution of garden waste, I’ve covered a bit of this anyway in, in my previous slide, but, um, prior to kind of the 2010s, I, I don’t know much. I wasn’t involved, so I know, you know what I’ve read, but I wasn’t particularly involved until they start bringing those charges in.

And from 20, 20 12 when we brought the charge in, I feel that. Initially there was this massive kind of drop in public opinion, and again, hopping back to my own experiences, and I dunno if people in the room were around at the time when, and introducing the charge, public opinion dropped massively. I can remember as we were a district council, a small district council in Nottinghamshire, and we were hounded by the press day and night.

They turned up at the depot. People brought their bins to the, uh, council officers and emptied them in protest out front. Um, you know, the police had to be called the staff. The staff were getting abused. I had a crew chased with, uh, baseball bats, um, in one area. They were cornered and, and threatened with baseball bats because the council were threatening or were introduced in this charge for garden waste.

Um, and it led to this really kind of public nose dive in. Public opinion of, of the services councils provide, you know, you are paid, I pay my council tax. So you went to my bins. How many of us have had that more care? More times than we get to, to admit. Um, so, you know, this, this kind of happened. And to mitigate that, the councils, uh, started working on it.

They introduced the charge, but then they, they introduced a year round collection service. So in those lovely winter months, December, January, and February, you can send all those vehicles out and collect. Uh, you know, a couple of tons of waste, but supposed to be a sweetener for residents. Um, my authority reduced, um, in increased the collections.

They, they increased the collections initially, but then once they realized the, the cost of that operationally was high. They then negotiated a price rise, so they froze the price and reduced the collections back down. Um, removed the, the winter of winter collections and just focused in on a better service.

And these changes went on kind of year on year. So from 20 20 12 when we started introducing. Charges, um, right through to now in 2025. The Garden Waste Service. It’s much better, isn’t it? It’s polished. It’s um, it’s well managed ish as well. Managed as council services get. And, um, it, it generally provides, I think, a good service to residents.

You pay your fee, you fill your bin up, we empty your bin. There’s no garden waste in your car. There’s no, you know, smelly rubbish everywhere. You get to chuck it in there and it’s gone. I think it’s a great service. So when we look at where we were to where we are now, there’s been a massive change, um, in terms of, uh, so I work for South Ki Steven District Council now, and this has a very different, uh, very same story to the first authority I worked out.

It started charging in 2012. The original cost was 35 pounds for the year. They didn’t know what uptake they were gonna get. But again, similar to the district that I worked in at the time, there was a 40% uptake in year one, which was huge. We were modeling on 25% uptake as a best case scenario to see if we could cover our costs for the service.

Um, this has gone up year on year, and currently at the authority I’m in, we pay residents pay 53 pounds for the year, which is two 30 ish per collection. Is that about right? Who’s higher than that? Anybody? Higher, higher, lower. Uh, you, where I live is a bit lower as well, cheekily. Um, I do think the charge for new customers is, is a bit cheeky in my opinion.

So if you haven’t got a bin where I currently work, it’s 96 pound, which is 29 pound for your bin. Then we add a delivery charge and then you’ve got your annual cost, but that’s a one off once you’ve paid that. Um, and we let households have unlimited bins, and I get this pros and cons of restricting or letting them have unlimited.

Um, and we have one resident with eight bins, which you think must have a massive garden, but actually I think they mainly use those bins for blocking their driveway. Not a fan of a gate, but bins seems to do the job, but year on year, they’re paying for, for eight bins. Um, and we’ve, we’ve. As a, as a council, as a process, as we’ve needed to increase costs, the, the second, third bins, et cetera, we’ve brought them up in line with the first bid.

So as previously we’ve offered discounts to encourage people. We now don’t really do that. We say you, you want the service. It’s one cost per bin. Um. Um, and this year there were 30 this year, last year, 32,000 subscribers. So we’re getting on for not far off a 50% take up rate, which is what we’re, we’re aiming for.

It is a really good service.