IN the last few weeks 52,000 homes around the district have been adapting to the council’s new recycling and food waste routine.

While the service experienced a few predictable teething problems, 98 per cent of collections are now running smoothly and the overall picture is one of success.

Just two weeks into the scheme 232 tonnes of food waste has already been collected.

To put that into perspective – that’s more than the weight of a blue whale.

But where does all this recycled food waste go? And what becomes of it?

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“Imagine you’re cooking your chips using gas for dinner. When you’ve finished you put the leftovers in the food waste bin.

“It gets collected by our crews and brought to a facility called an aerobic digester.

“Then a few weeks later it’s turned into gas from the plant and put back into the grid and the digestate is put back on the fields as fertiliser.

“From there it helps grow and cook the chips and then they are back on your plate. It’s a great example of the renewable circular economy.”

This helpful image of the path food caddy waste takes comes from councillor Simon Pickering.

As chair of Stroud District Council’s Environment Committee, he has been leading the new service and is determined to see Stroud at the top of the pile for recycling rates.

After being collected the food waste is sent 17 miles by truck to a new Anaerobic Digestion plant in Bishops Cleave, near Cheltenham.

This large facility, build by Andigestion, effectively creates energy from the food we throw away.

It takes the waste, separates it out from plastic and packaging, and turns it in to gas and fertilizer for farms.

Plant manager Jon Stait explained how this complicated process works.

“Anaerobic Digestion is a natural biological process where organic material is broken down by bacteria,” he said.

“The first step in the process is receiving the fuel for the plant. That’s where Stroud District Council come in.

“All the food waste they now collect gets sent over to us. The food waste is heated to 70C form one hour to make sure all the pathogens including Salmonella and E-Coli are killed off.

“The waste is then mixed together pasteurised to turn it into a liquid. It is then pumped into our huge production tanks called digesters.

“These contain cultures of bacteria which digest the waste over a period of 50 to 100 days. This results in the production of renewable biogas.

“Around 13 per cent of material that goes into the digester is transformed into this gas.

“This is stored in large domes and used to power gas engines which generate electricity onto the National Grid. Or it is passed through a Biomathane plant to can be injected straight into the gas grid.

“The rest is pumped onto the final stage of the process which produces nutrient rich liquid fertiliser which can then be used by farmers on the county’s fields.

“All in all we produce enough Biogas each year to supply 10,000 homes with gas or 12,500 homes with electricity.

“This process is also a third of the cost of disposing waste to landfill. And it’s much better for the environment.

“For every ton of food waste we treat, we can make 900 kilograms of fertiliser or generate 396 kWh of electricity.

“Anaerobic digestion is also the only renewable technology that is scalable to meet 2020 climate change targets.”

Mr Stait added: “We have been very impressed by the amount of food waste being brought in by Stroud district collection vehicles.

“The quantity of food waste for recycling is unprecedented compared to other areas in the county.”

This is something that Green councillor Pickering sees as a positive step forward for Stroud’s residents and its council.

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“Food waste makes up 30 per cent of the average bin. Brining that here and doing something useful with it is great,” he said.

“It’s a really good environmental story. It’s a complete cycle. This is the circular economy in action in Stroud. And the best thing about it is that the residents have done brilliantly.

“It also means there is less to the cost to the council in terms of food waste going to landfill. We also get incentive payment from the county council for maximising our food waste we recycle.

He continued: “Since we’ve introduced the scheme lots of people have realised that they can easily be recycling more.

“So we’ve had a lot of calls from people asking for more grey and green recycling bins. “We’ve got a big demand for that so we’re expecting the recycling rate to ramp up enormously.

“We’re currently at 30 per cent, so 50 per cent and the target would be 60 per cent in the next few years. That would put us at the top of the pile for recycling rates.

“The first two weeks of collection have shown that if you give the people of Stroud the opportunity to recycle more, they will do so with enthusiasm.”

He added that whilst the take-up of food waste recycling was good news, it is was worrying in terms of how much food is being wasted.

“It is likely that over a period of time we will see the figures drop a small amount, because seeing food being thrown away usually leads to people making lifestyle changes to reduce the amount of food they waste,” he said.

“No matter how hard we try we will have some food waste, such as vegetable peelings and meat bones, however we know that as a nation we throw away seven million tonnes of food a year, and it is estimated that 50 per cent could have been eaten.

“Reducing this is not only good for the environment, it saves money too.”

A number of residents have asked what they can, or should, line their kitchen caddy and food waste bin with.

The council advises that any type of plastic bag or newspaper can used to keep bins clean, although it is not a necessity as the containers can be easily washed - it’s up to individual residents to decide.

The anaerobic digesters, where the food waste is taken, have technology which separates the plastic at the start of the process, therefore it does not matter whether compostable or non-compostable bags and liners are used.

Most residents so far have favoured lining their kitchen caddy with small plastic bags or liners and then placing these into the outdoor bin, thereby keeping both containers clean.

On week three of the new service the council was still experiencing some issues with missed collections and residents without bins, however the crews from waste service provider Ubico have been working extra days to get issues resolved as quickly as possible.

A council spokesman said: “We have been working extremely hard to resolve any issues, which were inevitable at the beginning of a major service change for 52,000 households, but thankfully initial hiccups have been limited to a tiny percentage of homes and we expect everything to bed in nicely over the next couple of weeks.

“In a few cases reports of missed collections have turned out to be due to bins not being put out on time, so we’d like to remind everyone to have their containers out for collection by 6am on their collection day.

“We also need to emphasise that food waste is collected by a separate vehicle, and so it will not be collected at the same time as rubbish or recycling collections.”

For more information about the new waste and recycling service visit stroud.gov.uk/recycling