Brown is the colour

Latest efforts to boost the city’s recycling rate and protect the environment

Is it a bird, is it a plane…no it’s a brown bin.
They’re currently being used in neighbourhoods across the city to recycle green waste such as grass and hedge cuttings.
And they’re also being used to recycle cardboard such as food packaging, brown card and toilet roll tubes.
The bins are part of a trial involving 11,000 households across the city and are collected by recycling crews every fortnight.
The trial, which runs until March next year, is one of several ways in which Hull City Council is looking to boost the city’s recycling rate - and avoid dumping waste in landfill sites which harms the environment.
“Green waste collections are not something we’ve ever done before, but it’s something lots of residents have told us they wanted,” says Cllr Dave Woods, responsible for waste management in the city.
'If the trial is successful we will roll out brown bins to all the houses that want them.'

Recycling officers are reminding residents who are taking part in the brown bin trial that everything needs to be put into the bin loose, rather than inside plastic bags (which cannot be recycled).

Home composting

Another way residents can deal with green waste is by using home composters.
So far, more than 15,000 have been given away for free (and delivered for free) - and there’s still plenty more up for grabs (see info box on page 17).
The home composters can be filled with anything from grass cuttings, leaves and hedge trimmings to fruit and vegetable peelings, egg shells and even tea bags to make rich compost to help gardens grow.
Meanwhile, for residents who are not part of the brown bin trial, an excellent way of transporting green waste to the household waste recycling centres at Burma Drive, Wilmington and Wiltshire Road is in re-usable green waste bags.
The bags are available free from the centres. So far more than 80,000 have been given away.

Sutton Fields recycling centre

Another way in which Hull City Council is helping to boost the recycling rate is by building the council’s fourth household waste recycling centre.
Work begins next month on the centre, at Amsterdam Road, Sutton Fields, which will serve residents of north Hull when it is complete in May next year.
“It will make it easier for people to recycle because they won’t have to travel so far, and because it will reduce queues at the other centres,” says waste management officer Paul Thomas.
Like the Wiltshire Road site (where pupils from Eastfield Primary are pictured below), the Sutton Fields centre will practice what it preaches because it’s being built out of recycled materials, where possible.
Its foundations, for example, are being built from demolition waste and it will make use of recycled paving stones and motorway crash barriers.
When its fully operational, solar panels at the centre will generate electricity and hot water.

Black boxes and blue bins.

Meanwhile, thousands of residents are continuing to use their blue bins (for recycling newspapers and magazines) and black boxes (for recycling cans, tins, aerosols, aluminium foil, glass bottles and jars and plastic bottles).