Our Mission Statement for Waste Services
Our role is to help the residents and businesses of West Lothian reduce landfill waste. Our Mission Statement explains why we do what we do and how everyone has a role to play.
Why?
Landfill is expensive, damaging to the environment and come 2025 disposal of biodegradable materials will be banned.
In 2014 we looked at the contents of the average household grey landfill bin. An astounding 78% of the material by weight could have been recycled using existing services.
Environmentally this is significant but if you translate that into money, it equates to £2,260,000 spent on landfilling material which could have been directed to other services such as education, social work, roads etc if we recycled using the available systems offered by the council.
We all need to make the right waste choices to bring this waste of money and resources to an end for the benefit of all.
What does the service do?
Recycling & Waste Services are responsible for the collection of all household waste and the environmentally responsible management of waste in line with the government's Zero Waste Plan.
- We provide a collection service for recyclable and non-recyclable materials generated from over 80,000 households across West Lothian.
- We operate 5 recycling centres and 185 glass recycling points
- We carry out around 4600 bulky uplifts per year
- We collect commercial recyclables and non-recyclables from approximately 200 council premises.
- We visit schools, community groups, community events to encourage participation in the services offered.
- This amounts to more than 7 million customer interactions per year.
In 2019 58.2% of all household waste was recycled. This is equivalent to approximately 5,600 bin lorries being diverted from landfill in 2019.
How does all that tie in with reducing landfill waste?
The service's activities focus on taking West Lothian on the road towards sending zero waste to landfill. Our service activities fall within five key outcome areas:
- Providing effective environmental leadership
- Involving the community
- Reducing local and global environmental impacts
- Providing high quality, continually improving, effective and efficient service delivery
- Supporting economic development
By making sure that we plan and carry out our various activities aligned with the outcome areas, in a sustainable manner, we will ensure that the material collected has had the best opportunity to be diverted from landfill.
