Funding worries over major new food waste bin collection rollout in Amber Valley

There are concerns about affording the mandatory need for weekly food waste collections and competition between councils over bin lorries

Officials at a Derbyshire council are concerned about how it will provide weekly food waste collections from 2026. Amber Valley Borough Council, alongside all other UK councils which are responsible for bin collections, has to provide weekly food waste pickups from April 2026.

The previous Government passed a law detailing that local councils must start the weekly food collections, with most councils either currently providing no food waste collections, a joint one merged with garden waste, or a less frequent collection such as every two or three weeks. Amber Valley and Erewash are the only two Derbyshire councils not to recycle food waste at all, while the Derbyshire Dales is the only authority that already offers a separate collection.

Papers published by the borough council say the new service will involve each household gaining a kitchen-top caddy and a small additional outdoor bin in which to empty it for collection. People living in a block of flats will have a communal outdoor bin for their building.

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Officials in Amber Valley have been raising red flags about this additional recycling service for some time now and have detailed in a new report that paying for the pickups could prove an issue without further Government funding. They had referred to it as a “most unhelpful” additional pressure on its budget as a result of the new requirements and continues to expect issues in both mass competition and reaching the deadline for sourcing extra bin collection vehicles.

In January, borough council officials had forecast that they would receive £1.2 million from the Government this year to help acquire new vehicles, bins and containers to carry out the new required collections. However, the total cost of starting weekly food waste collections is set to be £1.45 million, meaning there is a shortfall of just over £250,000.

Officials detail the authority will only have enough money for some of the vehicles, bins and caddies it requires. This is without factoring in any spare bins for those which are lost, damaged or stolen – with a usual 10 per cent loss each year.

The council says the delivery of the new bins is treated as revenue costs and so does not fall under the Government’s funding for the expansion, with officials estimating it will cost more than £143,000 to deliver all the new bins. Borough council officials say there will be a need for nine new bin lorries, with nine new drivers and 18 new loaders required.

They say the lead-in time for procuring bin lorries will be at least six months and could increase up to 15 months “as further local authority pressure in the supply chain is expected, due to the deadline stipulated for the introduction of food waste collections”. A council report details: “It should be noted that if the Government changes its position on the provision of food waste collections and the new burdens funding, the council will be committed to fully rolling out the new service due to the need to have the infrastructure in place well before the implementation deadline of 31 March 2026.”

Alongside the food collections roll-out, companies will be required to cover the costs incurred by local councils in recycling their packaging, with the money fed into a central fund. Last year, Daniel Ayrton, Derbyshire County Council’s assistant director of resources and waste, said the food waste collections mandate was a “once in a generation opportunity” to make improvements.

He suggested the county bid for contracts on behalf of the districts and boroughs, who collect bins, to save on costs and improve efficiency and competition. Mr Ayrton had said: “If all local authorities need to buy food collection vehicles at the same time there will be a bottleneck and we need to act now, to use our overall size and buying power and not compete against each other. We can use our whole buying power if we work more collaboratively.

“No one authority can deliver these kinds of changes on its own.”

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