CUTTING carbon and meeting our challenging climate change targets is something that we take very seriously as councillors.

We all voted unanimously to declare a climate change emergency. Therefore, this is the green thread that must run through all the things that we do as a council, as we strive towards the ambitious target of being carbon neutral in our own operations by 2025. We have made a lot of progress towards this.

Just a couple of weeks ago we announced that a move to a more environmentally friendly fuel in our bin trucks has more than halved the council’s carbon footprint. In the first three months over 288 tonnes of carbon emissions have already been saved since the waste and recycling collection vehicles moved to hydrogenated vegetable oil as an alternative fuel, with up to 98% lower emissions than diesel.

And we are progressing plans to replace the much-loved Aquadrome with a new modern energy-efficient facility that will make a huge contribution to cutting the carbon council-owned facilities generate.

On Tuesday, as a cabinet, we took a decision that is aimed at doing what we can to protect the environment and support residents to recycle more. We agreed to introduce food waste collections from October 2025, earlier than the government says we have to under the Environment Act. This takes a third of waste out of rubbish bins and uses the food waste to create green energy.

Our aim is to work to reduce what goes into grey bins as much as we can. That’s why we also agreed to bring in different collections that will see more of a balance between collecting rubbish and collecting recycling. We agreed to new style weekly collections - with food waste emptied every week alongside what is left in the grey bin one week and recycling the next - from September 2026.

Under the National Environmental Improvement Plan 2023, we will have to recycle more than twice the amount we do now within 10 years. We will also have to more than halve the tonnage we collect. There is a huge change in behaviour that we all have to make. We want to support residents to do all they can to recycle more but also to encourage them to think more about trying to put even less in any bin.