The Household Recycling Centre in Station Street, Ross-on-Wye, is a much used facility, in fact it is the third busiest site in Herefordshire, behind Hereford and Leominster, which are waste transfer stations. These sites are used by the refuse collection vehicles to deposit waste after they have made their household collections. They are open seven days a week but all the others, including Ross, are open three days per week.

However, much of the waste which is brought to the site could be included in the roadside collections. This is something the team who deliver the waste services for the County’s residents are keen to encourage. The Centre opened in 2002 after being relocated from the site opposite, it accepts around 4000 tonnes of waste a year and on the busiest days has over 1000 visits per day. The largest waste type deposited is garden waste, at around 1,300 tonnes per annum, 30% of the total. This amount has not increased since it opened but the team would like to see a reduction.

Waste Disposal Team Leader, Kenton Vigus, told the Ross Gazette:?“Many people would like the site to be open longer hours and more days but it is a question of balance. We have to balance the cost of opening the facility. One of the issues is that there is such a wide catchment area. People often come to Ross to visit a large supermarket and bring their recycling with them.”

He said that people often do this as part of a regular routine but it would make the site less busy if they saved it until they had a large load, or used the waste collection services provided.

He said that the problems some residents report with queueing are due to the constraints imposed by the size of the site. When lorries arrive to collect the filled containers the traffic has to be stopped from moving around the site due to safety reasons.

This can take anything from a few minutes to half an hour and obviously at busy times can cause traffic to back up into the road.

He explained that the main responsibility he has is for logistics, from removing what people bring to the site to organising where it is going to be recycled. And although increased costs can be absorbed in some cases, the prices obtained for waste fluctuates widely. The high prices paid for scrap metal a year ago have now dropped sharply. Kenton explained that this is due to prices in Asia and China dictating the markets.

Most of the waste is recycled by companies based as close to the depot as possible, 73.55% of the waste received was recycled or recovered in the last year. Garden waste is composted at Dymock and wood, which makes up 10% of the waste brought to the centre can be turned into woodchip sheets.

Some non-household waste is also accepted, such as soil and rubble, for residents that have done DIY work in their own home.

Kenton explained that Ross is designed for private cars. No commercial waste is accepted at Ross and Herefordshire Council actively enforces the unlawful deposit of commercial waste at these facilities. Kenton explained that Ross is designed for private cars.

A Commercial Vehicle and Trailer (CVT) Permit Scheme allows residents to bring their own household waste to the site in a commercial vehicle or trailer. This control is in place to restrict commercial waste input and the size and frequency of use of these vehicles to reduce congestion.

Many residents would like to see Ross open for longer but the planning permission given for all the market town sites was three days a week and this has never been reviewed. Kenton said he is very aware that users would like to open longer but he said:?“We have got to get the balance right, it is not just a matter of people saying we want more, we need to encourage less trips to the Centre.”

There are currently three members of staff usually on duty at any one time. Two are helping drivers with their rubbish and one checking the traffic movements. They also encourage people with ‘good waste’ to use a special container where people who think their cast offs are too good to be crushed can place them. These items are collected by representatives of EnviroAbility and St Michael’s Hospice and are sold in their shops.

All Herefordshire’s Household Recycling Centres are busy, particularly at weekends when people are less likely to be at work. However Kenton believes residents are very lucky to have six facilities across the authority when other councils have been forced to limit and even reduce this service. There are only five facilities in the whole of Gloucestershire, which has a population 4.5 times bigger than Herefordshire.