Annual Report: 2005 2006

1
Community Composting Scheme
Annual Report 2005 / 2006
Cwm Harrys Composting Project is part of the
PØWys Cleanstream Project, now in its 3rd year.
The Cleanstream project forms a key part of the
overall Powys Exemplar project. PØWys
Cleanstream is a complex partnership project
involving 3 community sector recycling
organisations PØWys Zero Waste Ltd, Cae Post Ltd
Cwm Harry Land Trust Ltd working together to
deliver a kerbside collection service to rural
communities. Cwm Harrys part in the project is
to operate a kerbside service using 240 litre
Compostainer wheeled bins to collect and compost
green garden waste.
The compost is then used to grow vegetables for
the Community Supported Agriculture scheme,
bringing fresh food back to where some of the raw
material originally came from.
Summary of performance for the year
Gate fees are an important income source as the
costs of receiving green waste are much lower
than collecting it ourselves. Participation
rates for our own collection scheme are
exceptionally high by UK standards in Tregynon
participation is about 80. Over the past couple
of years Cwm Harry has concentrated on developing
its community composting in the villages of
Tregynon, Adfa, New Mills, Manafon Bettws
Cedewain. This has had mixed results with the
exception of Tregynon, it has proven difficult to
persuade householders to participate in viable
numbers where it has taken several years of
working closely with individual householders to
raise sufficient awareness, which then translates
into viable levels of participation.
2
Difficult challenging times for recycling
As Wales moves away from a waste management
regime to one focused on resource recovery, the
community recycling sector has had to adapt to a
fast moving and fluid picture of changing
circumstances. Whilst there may be scope for
some limited grant funding, this is unlikely to
be at anything like the current levels for much
longer. This means that the Project must achieve
a good measure of economic self-sufficiency to
stay on its feet.
Adopting professional standards developing
flexibility to cope with change are the keys to
this survival strategy. Although Cwm Harry
surrendered its Newtown kerbside collections to
the Council in 2004, it successfully tendered to
take in half of Newtowns green waste collected
by the Council. It has recently tendered for
work to take in some of the material to be
captured by the new village skips coming into
service from April 2006. Now that the Council is
itself introducing a user pays charging regime
for green waste collections, a
competitive market is beginning to open up
develop, which will present Cwm Harry with new
opportunities. Given Powys low population
density, Cwm Harry remains in a class of its own
as an efficient on-farm composting operation.
Each participating household received an
extraordinarily good deal for the money they are
spending. This bodes well for the future if the
project can make headway in Newtown as well as
the surrounding villages, so as to make the
overall enterprise much more viable.
At the current level of grants, the true costs of
recycling materials from domestic sources are
heavily disguised. The challenge will be to
transfer much more of the financial burden to the
shoulders of the people who actually generate the
material in the first place i.e. introducing a
user pays principle to all recycling services.
This is only likely to carry support if the
emphasis shifts from penalising those who dont
participate to incentives for those who do, by
ensuring that legal commercial structures
reflect the concept of a community owning its own
waste deriving wealth from those materials.