Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council’s food waste collection pilot are saving the council over £1,000 per week in disposal costs, early progress report finds.
Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council’s food waste collection pilot, launched in late April 2025, is now in its third month of operation.
The scheme, which involves over 9,205 households across nine wards, is part of the council’s preparation for the mandatory borough-wide rollout of weekly food waste collections by June 2026.
An early progress report on the scheme has found that the separate collections are saving the council over £1,000 per week in disposal costs, with the food waste tonnage consistently around 12 tonnes per week being collected.
The report attributes the saving to the ‘significantly lower cost’ of processing food waste using anaerobic digestion compared to traditional disposal methods for general waste.
A formal public report containing key performance indicators such as collection tonnages, resident participation rates, and contamination levels has not yet been released.
The pilot has also sparked public debate regarding the selection of the trial areas. Residents have posed questions around the pilot areas predominantly covering more affluent areas of the borough, where residents may be more traditionally more engaged with recycling initiatives.
The report also analyses the results of a communications campaign around the scheme. Before the campaign, the report says comments from residents about the trial related to worries about rats, the smell of the bins, the bins blowing away, where to put the bins, and what the council is doing with the food waste.
However, since the food waste collections began, the themes of the comments changed ‘dramatically’, according to the report, with residents more concerned about replacing bin liners and why their bins had not been collected.