Newham Council is set to launch a pilot food waste collection programme in late November 2025, targeting 12,500 households across the borough.
The initiative is part of the council's efforts to meet the government's Simpler Recycling reforms mandated by the Environment Act 2021. The Act requires all local authorities to provide separate food waste collections for all houses by 31 March 2026.
The borough wide food waste service will be a weekly collection service that is provided to all households across the borough.
The separate collection will be for all food scraps including vegetable and fruit peelings, cooked and uncooked meat, eggshells, and leftovers.
The first phase of the food waste collection service will be implemented to a demographically representative sample of the borough, comprising 12,500 households, and will launch in late November 2025. The pilot program, referred to as Phase 1, will cover four small, distinct areas collected on different days (Monday to Thursday), with a communal collection round on Friday. This phase will cover a variety of areas in the borough and different property types. The specific locations are shown in Figure 1 of the Public Reports Pack, but are not named in the text.
The council has secured £2.1 million in capital funding from the government for vehicles and containers, along with £642,000 in transitional resource revenue funding to support the project.
The council plans to provide residents with a 5-litre kitchen caddy for indoor use and a 23-litre outdoor caddy for collection. For communal properties, 180-litre bins with metal hatches will be provided.
To ensure residents are well-informed, the council will launch a comprehensive communications campaign, including physical communications, social media, website information, and video content. Materials will be produced in the top five languages spoken in the borough and co-produced with residents.
Following collection, the food waste will be processed at an Anaerobic Digestion facility, producing digestate fertiliser, electricity for the national grid, or heat energy for local businesses and homes.
Eunomia, an independent environmental consultancy, estimated that a borough wide food waste scheme if implemented at the same time as a move to fortnightly refuse collections would result in:
- 5,688 tonnes per year being diverted from non-recyclable refuse to the separate food waste scheme.
- Recycling rates increase to 35%.
- Reduction in residual waste to 70,851 tonnes
The success of the food waste collection schemes is measured through the household recycling rate, residual waste collected per household, and the amount of carbon saved. Phase One of the food waste roll out will be used to test some of the assumptions made by Eunomia. It is expected to capture 250 tonnes of food waste and save 41kg of CO2 per tonne of waste recycled. It will improve the amount of waste recycled. In addition, the first phase will be used to understand any barriers to participation so that these can be mitigated for the Phase Two roll out.
