Bristol Waste is forecast to make a loss of £800,000 this year as the council-owned rubbish company struggles to balance the books. A major challenge facing the firm, which collects the bins of thousands of homes in Bristol, is the plummeting price of recycled materials like plastic.
The price at which the firm can sell recycled material to packaging producers is falling fast, as there is now less demand from producers and more competition from factories making cheap virgin plastic. Adding to cost pressures at Bristol Waste are wider challenges, like rising costs and wages.
Meanwhile, a fifth of households in Bristol have been affected by “unacceptable levels” of missed bin collections, with streets across the city regularly waiting days to have their recycling picked up late, according to Bristol Waste’s shareholder business plan, which will be considered by councillors on the strategy and resources policy committee on Monday, March 17. Satisfaction with the recycling service also dropped from 74 per cent in 2022 to 62 last year, according to council quality of life surveys.
The business plan said: “There are external and internal challenges facing the business, such as declining recyclate revenue rates driven by the external market, and slower commercial growth which we are having to manage carefully. The sale of recyclates for BWC (Bristol Waste Company) has a direct impact on the profitability for the business.
“Plastics demand is driven by the Packaging Recovery Note price, which has plummeted to £55 per tonne from a high of +£200 per tonne in July. The slump is also caused by the drop in buying virgin material, which is flooding the market (primarily from China).”
Out of all the large English cities, Bristol recycles the most rubbish, with a recycling rate of around 45 per cent for the past decade. But council bosses believe this rate could be much higher, which would prevent less useful material from being incinerated, and bring in more income too. Last July a trial was launched collecting used nappies, which saw 150,000 nappies recycled in six months.
Other challenges facing Bristol Waste include a change in what people throw away, with much more cardboard since the rise in online shopping during the pandemic, and fewer glass and newspapers. This means the design of the collection trucks is becoming out of date, and new vehicles could have flexible containers, to better manage the change in material which people recycle.
Another challenge is obnoxious parking, obstructing bin men from navigating down small side streets. Some of the new replacement vehicles could be narrower, and the firm is trying to raise awareness of badly parked vehicles.
A third problem is that soft plastic is not currently collected from homes in Bristol, meaning the packaging often used for food has to be thrown away in black bins. The possibility of collecting soft plastics was included during a recent consultation on bins, but no immediate commitment was made. However, the government will make collecting soft plastics mandatory for councils from 2027.