New bins for every house in Plymouth under £2.3m plan

Plymouth households will have to put their food scrapings in a separate bin under a £2.3m city council scheme. About 123,000 city homes will be given two new food waste bins - one for the kitchen and another to go out on the street.

This will be in addition to the regular brown waste bins, green recycle bins and black garden waste bins. The authority will also have to buy 10 new non-electric bin lorries.

The weekly collections are expected to begin in the spring of 2026. It means that residents will have to separate leftovers and peelings from rubbish bound for the brown bin, allowing this waste to be processed separately and converted into renewable energy.

The scheme, ordered by the Labour Government, will initially cost £2,296,779, of which £1,941,574 will come from a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) grant. But the council will have to borrow £355,205 towards the initiative.

Cllr Tom Briars-Delve, cabinet member for the environment and climate change, said: “I am so pleased to be introducing domestic food waste collections to Plymouth, bringing us in line with local authorities across the region in providing this valuable service. The benefits of this move represent positives for people and the planet.

“Not only will we increase our recycling rate and reduce emissions, but it will also help people to see how much food they waste and hopefully save money by changing habits. It’s a really exciting time and over the next year, we’ll be working with communities to help encourage households to reduce the amount of waste they produce to make an even greater environmental impact.”

The decision to begin the food waste collections will help increase the city’s recycling rate and support the ambitions of the council’s Net Zero Action Plan. The council has already started the process of lining up the required infrastructure.

An executive decision to allocate cash to buy the new collection vehicles and “internal and external caddies”was signed on Wednesday, November 20.

The council will have to provide 5/7 litre “internal caddies” to 123,000 households in Plymouth of which about 29,000 are flats or Houses with Multiple Occupants (HMO). Residents will be asked to place the following into their new kitchen bins:

• all uneaten food and plate scrapings
• tea bags – biodegradable and non-biodegradable accepted
• coffee grounds
• out of date or mouldy food
• raw and cooked meat, including bones
• raw and cooked fish, including skin and bones
• shellfish and seafood shells
• dairy products such as cheese
• eggs and eggshells
• rice, pasta and beans
• baked goods such as bread, cakes and pastries
• fruit and vegetables, including raw and cooked vegetables and peelings and cut flowers
• pet food waste .

The council must also provide kerbside bins where residents will deposit food waste for collection by the authority on a weekly basis. Communal bins will be provided for blocks of flats, estates and clusters of flats.

The food waste will be collected in new bespoke watertight bin lorries that can transfer food waste without leakage. The council looked at buying electrical vehicles (EV) but was told they would cost about £300,000 each and “the market and technology for food waste EVs was immature and would present significant issues for the ongoing maintenance of vehicles”.

Prior to the service beginning, an extensive public engagement programme will be rolled out across the city to ensure residents know how the service will work. There are no current plans to change the frequency of green and brown bin collections as a result of the new service.

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