Household Recycling Collections
One of the first and most noticeable service improvements is to Torbay’s recycling and waste services. These great new recycling and waste services started on the 6 September 2010 and will help Torbay increase recycling and cut down on the amount of waste ending up in landfill sites and will enable residents to recycle up to 85% of their waste.
Improvements to Household Recycling Collections
- a weekly kerbside collection of recycling from all households, to replace current fortnightly recycling services, meaning residents only have to store recycling for one week
- an increased range of recyclable materials collected at kerbside
- a new food waste recycling collection for all food waste, including food waste and scraps that are not suitable for home composting, and which would currently go to landfill
- new recycling containers -- recycling boxes, a food caddy and food waste bin, to replace the large, green recycling wheelie bin, for those households that have them, and allow residents to separate their waste, leading to purer materials for re-processing and provide facilities for better and more flexible recycling storage
- same day recycling and residual waste collections for most residents, making it easy to remember collection days
- improved recycling for flats with shared facilities, including:
- an increased range of materials collected
- new weekly collections of food waste
- comparable recycling and waste services to other local areas currently achieving higher recycling rates than Torbay
- a waste collection solution tailored to Torbay
Benefits of Improvements:
- 22% reduction in household residual waste tonnage in 2010 increasing to 40% in 2013
- nearly 12,000 tonnes per annum of materials diverted from landfill into recycling from 2011, which is the equivalent of filling 40 Olympic sized swimming pools
- a 2,267 tonnes per annum reduction in overall waste arisings due to the behavioural change caused by separate collection of food waste
- kerbside collected recycled tonnage almost doubled by 2012
- kerbside collected recycling and composting rate increased from 35% to 45% in the first year and achievement of the 50% recycling target by 2012 (5 years early) and providing parity with other local areas
Recycling Services
From 6th September all residents are receiving the Recycling Box Collection and the Food Waste Collection services.
Recycling Box Collection
TOR2 will be increasing the range of recyclable items collected as part of the new scheme, so residents have been provided with two recycling boxes to store the items in, which will be collected weekly. Visit the Recycling Box Collection pageto find out more about which materials can be collected in the boxes.
Food Waste Collection
All food waste, cooked and uncooked, can be put in the food waste bin, for example, meat and fish (including bones), dairy products, bread, fruit and vegetables. Residents who home compost can use this service to collect food they cannot compost, such as cooked food, meat and fish. To recycle food waste residents have been provided with a food waste caddy and lockable food waste bin. Visit the Food Waste Collection page to find out how to use these containers to make recycling food waste easy.
Helping Residents
Residents have received the following to provide all the information they need to change over to the new recycling and waste service:
- a letter specifying how the changes will affect them (w/c 19th July)
- a leaflet on information on how to use and present your recycling containers
- a collection calendar
Why change to the new recycling and waste services?
The UK is now subject to EU legislation and waste targets which of course translate down to local authority waste targets. The aims of these are to view waste as a resource and reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases from waste. For biodegradable waste, fines have been implemented through the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme (LATS) and a fine is imposed for every tonne of biodegradable waste sent to landfill in excess of a local authority’s allocated allowance.
If Torbay does not change the way waste is managed in the Bay, it would face fines of around £27 million by the year 2020, as stated in the Municipal Waste Management Strategy for Torbay 2008 – 2025.
Torbay must improve its performance against its recycling and composting targets and reduce the amount of waste it sends to landfill, to minimise the impact on the environment and climate change and to avoid heavy financial penalties.
Torbay cannot continue with its present systems of waste collection and disposal as these are unsustainable, do not allow Torbay to hit its key waste and recycling targets and are unaffordable. Torbay needs new and improved recycling and waste services to ensure it can keep up with other local areas that already have them and are successfully achieving higher recycling rates.
The source separated waste management solution for recyclable materials introduced in Torbay will produce higher quality and purer materials, which will result in an anticipated revenue gain of about £1 million a year, due to the superior quality of material and hence the higher price that this system can deliver.
Related Documents
All documents open in a new window. Need more help with documents? View the Document Help page.
Contact Customer Call Centre
- Tel: 01803 207900
- Email: connections@torbay.gov.uk
- Fax: N/A
Related Pages
- Recycling and Waste
- Roads and Highways

TOR2 feature in Torbay View (Winter 2010)
Tor2 Feature