Council aiming to turn card into pound notes!

More than 200 tonnes of cardboard has been collected from the recycling residents of Rotherham in just four days—and the council expect there to be masses more to come.

At the start of December, Rotherham Borough Council said that it would only collecting cardboard and not garden waste from the borough’s thousands of green bins until the end of February.

The trial scheme was hampered by December’s big freeze but it is now up and running.

The huge pile pictured and the results of further collections will be recycled by Newport Paper Company, bringing thousands of pounds into council coffers.

In previous winters, difficulties arose for the authority's waste management team in trying to compost the material from the green bins which contained too much cardboard and not enough garden waste.

A council spokeswoman said: “Unfortunately, the trial was severely hampered by both the bad weather prior to Christmas and then the start of the Christmas waste collections, both of which resulted in a suspension of the green bin service altogether.

“Now the trial is back on track and the photograph demonstrates just how much cardboard has been generated from households across Rotherham over the Christmas period.”

Cllr Jahangir Akhtar, the council's Cabinet member for neighbourhoods, said: “The response from Rotherham householders has been fantastic—almost 200 tonnes of cardboard has been collected in just four days. 

“All this cardboard would normally have gone off for composting, which would have been far from ideal, but now it is to be recycled back into cardboard products.”