Astonishingly, Fenland District Council told councillors at their seminar last month that they had not discussed their proposed scheme with Peterborough Council, who have been operating their own charged-for garden waste collection scheme since 2014. I've been sent some information about the Peterborough scheme. The document from Peterborough Council shows that in the first year after the charged-for scheme was launched Peterborough saw a huge reduction in the amount of recyclable food and garden waste collected, and an almost identical increase in landfill waste [1]. Over just FIVE months, the amount of recyclable food waste collected went down by 343 tonnes and garden waste dropped by 2,065 tonnes. Over the same period, the amount of landfill (general) waste collected shot up by 2,398 tonnes. Peterborough found that 45% of the waste in their landfill bins was either organic kitchen waste or recyclable garden waste... The additional landfill waste increased the council's waste treatment costs by a whopping £118,000 over those five months! This means that those who were paying fees to the council to have their garden waste collected have effectively been subsidising their non-paying neighbours to chuck their waste in their normal bins. And that's not to mention the £40,000 fee the council paid to contractor Serco just to set up the call centre and payment facilities to administer the scheme! It's quite clear from Peterborough's experience that charging for garden waste increases costs and reduces the amount of waste being recycled. It's a bad deal for residents, and a bad deal for the environment. P.S. We had more front page coverage in the Fenland Citizen two weeks ago! Please keep sharing the petition with your friends to keep this on the news agenda! [1] Peterborough actually turn what I term "landfill" waste into electricity. Fenland doesn't have such a scheme, though, so the effect would be that this waste goes to landfill. Either way, it is less good for the environment than simply recycling the waste properly in the first place. The word "landfill" here has been used as it is a term people in Fenland will understand in relation to which of their three bins this correlates to.