Council chiefs are hoping to learn lessons from early adopters of food waste collections as progress is made on introducing the new service to Southampton.
All local authorities in England and Wales need to offer weekly kerbside household food waste collections from April 1, 2026.
Southampton City Council officers began working on the project in January.
This week cabinet members approved purchasing six 12-tonne refuse collection vehicles (RCVs) and around 300,000 caddies and containers.
Deputy leader cllr Simon Letts admitted the council was “slightly behind the curve” on the scheme compared to other authorities, but he insisted this offered advantages as well as disadvantages.
Speaking at cabinet on Tuesday, April 29, he said: “We can learn from other people’s systems and how they have implemented food waste collections.
“I know, for example, Portsmouth are slightly ahead of us on this.
“The advantage of that is errors and problems will have arisen and the local government community in its very nature will have found solutions to that which we would readily steal.”
Cllr Letts said the new service supported an aspiration to push up the city’s recycling rate and reduce the amount of general waste, which would help the environment and save the council money.
The cost of the RCVs and caddies will be covered by a £2.109m capital grant from government, with £628,000 in revenue funding provided to deliver containers to residents, manage the project and carry out communications activity.
Cllr Eamonn Keogh, cabinet member for environment and transport, said officers had worked in a “timely” fashion to ensure the vehicles could be procured during a period when other local authorities were going through the same process.
“As a city our volume of general waste collected is too high and our volume of recyclable waste collected is too low but food waste offers an opportunity to reverse these trends by removing food waste from our general waste and reducing the risk of contamination of our recycled waste,” cllr Keogh said.
“We are currently working on a delivery and communication plan for the city in advance of the introduction of food waste but we are very mindful of the challenges this will bring.”
Cllr Keogh said the food waste would generate an income stream for the council through how it is processed after collection.
Meanwhile, he told cabinet a joint project with Portsmouth City Council and Hampshire County Council for a £50million recycling facility at Chickenhall Lane in Eastleigh had been approved.
The new plant will mean by the end of 2027 more items can be recycled, the cabinet member said.
On this development, cllr Letts said: “It has been a long-standing issue in Hampshire generally that we are not recycling at a good rate.
“That applies not just to us but across the county.
“If you compare rural authorities here to rural authorities in other parts of the country, we are significantly down and the key blockage to that has always been the inability of us to reach an agreement to build a recycling centre.”
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