Food waste update

Please be aware that from 1 March 2022 all food caddy collections have been suspended due to the permanent closure of the privately owned Vital Earth reprocessing facility in Ashbourne. This means that residents are being asked to put their food waste in the domestic waste containers for the next four weeks.

While Derbyshire Dales District Council remains one of the few local councils to offer separate food waste collections, they apologise for the temporary inconvenience to all residents.

For a number of years, Vital Earth has recycled food and garden waste from Derbyshire Dales collections to produce compost, used in horticulture and sold at local garden centres.

The District Council has been negotiating with Serco on the new arrangements and has identified alternative recycling sites in the north and south of Derbyshire that will take the district’s garden waste, which means garden waste collections continue unchanged for residents on bin collections.

Unfortunately, while one of the new sites will accept garden waste in compostable sacks, the other will not and we cannot split the Dales into separate collection areas. Residents on sack collection rounds who subscribe to our garden waste scheme have already received a direct communication from the Council about this.

The council has identified an alternative option for food waste disposal and will provide further updates in four weeks when operational details have been finalised with Serco.