Last week I attended the Fountainbridge/Craiglockhart Green group meeting with guest speaker Melissa Viguier, waste aware education officer in the council.
- Overview
- Grants for community groups
- Green cones
1. Overview
www.edinburgh.gov.uk/wasteaware
Email Melissa Viguier
Melissa gave a powerpoint presentation. The powerpoint was at a basic level although she gave plenty of context and talked around the images. This however, was part of the programme to reduce, reuse and recycle and there was no explicit mention of redesigning, refurbishing and repairing.
Edinburgh produces enough waste to fill 3 Murrayfields per year (probably uses the metric of Meadowbanks per year when giving a talk in the East of the city :)
Typical proportions of household waste (categories overlap):
- 52% compostable … major thing to concentrate on
- 25% packaging
- 74% recyclable
One criticism of the context is that targets for percentages of waste stream to be recycled doesn’t address absolute levels of waste.
Lots of flyers for composting at home, and reduced price compost bins.
Different contractors run box and on-street recycling, and another one runs the brown bins service. On-street recycling is sorted by hand.
2. Grants for community groups
The waste aware programme has been awarded money from the SG for the next 16 years. One of its tasks is to distribute this to local projects and 20 projects have been awarded grants to date (next deadline in May). The criteria are that the projects must direct waste from landfill and involve the community, so there have been allotment sites applying for composters, my local parent and toddler group buying tables for their nearly new sale, and … errr … 18 more.
3. Green cones
When talking about composting, we heard about The green cone … eats the food you don’t which can take cooked food. Not strictly a composter, but it can dispose of fish, meat, poultry, diary, curry and bones but not crustacean shells. From a global warming perspective, food waste digesters result in a lower global warming burden than centralised treatment options and are shown to be almost an order of magnitude cheaper than centralised treatment.
18 Saughton Mains, no more! 
It hacks me off that I’d be happy to compost but have no garden at all. If compostable waste was collected i’d be so there…
I note that the recently-published SG research on International review of recycling policies does not include information on England.
The EU landfill directive 99/31/EC banned landfill of whole tyres by 2003 and shredded tyres by 2006, although the directive explicitly excludes bicycle tyres.