Garden Waste

Your local Council offers a kerbside garden waste collection, which can be a great way of recycling the hedge trimmings and lawn clippings from your garden. For more information about your local garden waste collection, contact your Council.

Garden waste collected from the kerbside, along with garden waste collected at the Household Waste Recycling Centre, is composted at a local composting facility.  Here your garden waste is composted to create new high quality compost, which is sold in bulk to local landscapers and some has even been used on the football pitch at Chelsea!

Each kerbside lorry can collect an average of eight tonnes of garden waste.  The waste is tipped out and any unwanted items such as plastic, and large pieces of wood are removed by staff.

The material is then shredded and formed into “windrows” (long triangular mound shapes) which are optimal for the composting process.  Each windrow holds approximately 200 tonnes of material, about a weeks worth of garden waste deliveries to the site.

The windrows take about 10 weeks to process.  During this time temperature and moisture are checked daily.  Temperatures of 65-80 degrees are created during this process, and kill off any harmful bacteria and weed seeds.

After the 10 weeks, the material is screened to 20mm and material that is too large is returned to the beginning of the composting process.  The 20mm material is left to mature for a minimum of 3 weeks when it is screened to 10mm.  The resulting products are sold on to landscapers and farmers by the composting facility.