CHESHIRE East Council cabinet members will discuss plans to introduce food waste collection in the borough next week.

A report has been compiled by Ralph Kemp, in charge of waste at the council, recommending that the council moves ahead with plans for food waste to be collected alongside garden waste from April 2019.

The proposal, to be discussed at a meeting on Tuesday, would require the development of a new facility at Leighton Grange Farm in Crewe.

In the report to cabinet members, Mr Kemp said: “The council is seeking to provide a food waste recycling collection as part of our garden waste recycling service.

“This is an aspiration of our waste strategy to reduce the disposal of food waste which currently accounts for 40 per cent of our residual black bin waste.”

Mr Kemp added that ‘not recycling food waste … would increase costs and endanger the council’s ability to achieve future recycling targets’.

The council had tendered across two options – option one being the construction of the new plant in Crewe, with option two being to collect the waste from the new environmental hub in Middlewich and transport it to an existing site to be processed.

Plans to bring in food waste collection as new and separate service had previously been scrapped in 2012 due to inflating costs.

Cheshire East Council says the new tender, which opened following a cabinet decision in September 2015, is ‘estimated to be in the region of £16 million depending on the scale of any proposed plant’.

Planning permission would need to be secured for the Leighton Grange Farm site, with access improvements estimated to cost between £500,000 and £1 million while the distribution of collection caddies and bags is estimated at £322,000.

One bid has been recommended for approval, with the report stating: “The proposed preferred bidder is offering a relatively simple in vessel composting plant, sited at the rear of the council-owned Leighton Grange Farm, adjacent to the existing sewage works.

“The plant has an annual processing capacity of 60,000 tonnes. The solution is sized for Cheshire East Council’s waste of between 40,000 and 45,000 tonnes, with an additional capacity of 15,000 to 20,000 tonnes for commercial food waste.”

There is a national target to recycle 50 per cent of waste, with a European Commission target to hit 65 per cent by 2030.