Thanks to VWHDC for a press release this evening.
From now on the citizens of Abingdon will be allowed to use thin plastic bags to line food waste bins. That includes shopping bags, bread wrappers, and white bin liners. Up until now only pale green compostable bags have been allowed and they are expensive and can easily tear.
Food waste is collected weekly from Abingdon and taken to a processing plant near Wallingford to be turned into fertilizer and gas. The processing plant is now able to remove the plastic bags and send them to another energy recovery facility.
This new freedom is not a license to put half a pack of bacon – still in its packaging – into the food waste bin.
Aha. Does that mean it’s not actually going to be composted, or are they paying some poor souls to empty the bags?
This is both good and bad news. Bad environmentally as more plastic in the environment – but as you can re-use salad and bread bags etc, slightly alleviated.
But good as the compostable bags dissolve at the merest hint of wetness in the food, and rip at the slightest pressure – and they’re more expensive. You’ll be able to fit more in a small bin liner too. NB: You always have been able to use newspaper as a liner, but this has the same wetness problems.
I use green compostable bags in my small kitchen bin, then transfer these to the larger green bin. Presumably I can use a small bin liner in the larger bin? This would be useful as a couple of times a bag has been left stuck to the bottom of the bin – and it gets a bit whiffy having to wait another week before it is collected!
I think bags will be ‘burned’ to create electricity….So most likely Sarah,