Winchester’s weekly food waste collections to reach the governments 2021 Environment Act.

Food waste bins will arrive at people’s doors in Winchester from this month to March

Residents will use a five litre kitchen caddy for weekly food waste collection.

Instead of being incinerated, the collected food waste will go to an anaerobic digestion plant, which will produce biofertiliser for local farmers.

Uneaten food, raw meat, peelings, mouldy food, and tea bags can go in the caddy, but oil, glass, packaging, plastic, and liquids must stay out of bins.

Samantha Watts from Winchester Food Partnership said: “I think it will be overall successful, I think there will be some pockets within Winchester that won’t use it for lots and lots of different reasons.”

These possible struggles to reduce food waste and usage of the new bins, Samantha points out, might be due to people not recognising “what is classed as food waste, like tea bags and bones”.

As “70% of the food in Hampshire that gets wasted due to food being spoiled,” Watts points out that people need to “rethink how they shop, shopping where they can more frequently and buying less so it doesn’t waste”.

Kaylee Shaw, Winchester City Council’s waste and environmental project manager, said “Hampshire, there’s a limit to what you can recycle” so it “has been stuck at about 44%” and with the new food waste bins, “we really hope that we can crack 50% recycle rate”.

Shaw added “the main pushback has been we don’t want another bin” as “space is at a premium, especially in some of the older areas of Winchester”.