Nudging rather than nagging will be crucial to the success of Crawley’s new food waste scheme, councillors agreed this week.
From March 31 2026, food waste collections will be added to the refuse lorry routes. With food making up 44% of Crawley’s waste, it is hoped that such collections will greatly reduce that figure.
But there has been some kick-back from members of the public about plans to reduce general waste collections to once a fortnight, with food collections weekly.
Some of the finer details about the proposed changes are still being worked out, such as whether the food waste bins should have liners and how much they would cost.
Yesterday, Crawley Borough Council’s cabinet received a report from a scrutiny panel which was set up to explore how to improve the borough’s household waste recycling rate.
In 2022/23, Crawley had the lowest recycling rate in the county when it came to household waste sent for reuse, recycling or composting.
Figures from letsrecycle.com said the borough recycled 31.4% of its waste – 285.4kg per person.
The figures for the rest of the county were Arun 42.3% (352.1kg/p), Adur 39.4% (279.8kg/p), Chichester 45.7% (366.6kg/p), Horsham 51.4% (353.4kg/p), Mid Sussex 41.8% (323.7kg/p) and Worthing 41.8% (340.5kg/p).
But the vast majority of Crawley homes have much smaller gardens than elsewhere in the county, and the borough has a high proportion of flats – 10,970 of them spread through 989 blocks. Both points have a big impact on the recycling rates.
Cabinet agreed that education and communication would be key to easing people through the change.
Ian Irvine (Lab, Broadfield) said: “It’s easy to blame the council if the recycling rate isn’t what we want it to be or isn’t the same as it is in other parts of West Sussex.
“But, at the end of the day, it’s down to individual householders to recycle and make sure [it’s] done properly – that things aren’t mixed up so recycling has to get scrapped.
“But there is a fine line to tread between us helping people to understand how to go about recycling and us telling people how to go about recycling.
“The last thing we want is something like the Daily Mail on our backs calling us the recycling police or something like that.
“It has to be done by a process of nudging and education. I think most people in Crawley would be supportive of this.”
