New rules ‘will quadruple waste cost for care homes’
CONTROVERSIAL new recycling rules will quadruple the cost of dealing with waste and ruin already cash-strapped care homes across Wales, those working within social care have warned.
The new law, which will come into force on April 6, will require most workplaces to separate recyclable materials and arrange separate collections.
The list of who the law applies to is comprehensive covering care homes, schools, universities, GPs, hospitality venues, and prisons. NHS hospitals and private hospitals have an extra two years to comply with the law.
It means a ban on sending food waste to sewer, separately collected waste going to incineration and landfill, and stopping all wood waste going to landfill. Paper and card can be mixed together in the same container and metal, plastic, and cartons can be put together.
There will be a phased approach to small electronic and electrical goods over two years and three years for textiles.
The Welsh Government says it is introducing the new law to improve the quality and quantity of how workplaces collect and separate waste in a bid to reach zero waste. Wales is already the best in the UK for domestic recycling and third-best in the world.
The Welsh Government predicts the increase in recycling it forecasts the new regulations will bring about will save the economy £186.9m over a decade.
But Georgie Llewelyn, whose family have run Penpergwm House residential home, near Abergavenny, for more than 30 years, said they will face bills of more than £1,000 a month as a result of the new workplace recycling regulations.
Ms Llewelyn, who is general manager of the 34-bed care home, said: “Up until now we have been using a very good company, Thomas Waste Management, who have been collecting all our recyclable material and separating it at their site.
“But they’ve written to us and told us they will no longer be able to do that and in future will only collect the black sacks of mixed residual waste.
“We have been paying them £250 a month to collect from our two 1,100litre bins with clinical waste collected separately by a specialist company and at the same time we’ve been incinerating paper and cardboard.
“I have had one quote which was for £150 a week plus VAT and that doesn’t cover the paper and cardboard which will also have to be collected. It’s going to cost us over £1,000 a month.
“We have waste bins in each resident’s room and these are emptied every day and bins around the home which are emptied three times a day but many of our residents have dementia and just don’t understand recycling so it will just be something else for our very busy staff to deal with.
We are not a large care home but what will this be like for big care homes of 60 to 100 beds?”
Ms Llewelyn said prices will have to go up at the care home to balance the books and the new law could also cause a health hazard.
“At this time of year we are having to put prices up and we will have to consider the cost of the new recycling arrangements so the people that will really suffer will be our residents and their families and it’s going to be hugely expensive,” she said.
“The bins the Welsh Government are suggesting we use are only suitable for a domestic household but we have 34 people here being served food five times a day and the suggestion is that we will only need a 240litre wheelie bin.
“That fills me with horror because having that in a bin area is just going to attract rats and so there will be real health issues.
“Time is ticking now and because our long-term recycling company has been forced to abandon collecting recyclable waste we are going to have to pay through the nose and face the prospect in this rural area of having about five massive bin lorries turning up here every week.
“It will mean us sourcing the kind of bins and what colour they have to be and we can’t afford to have too few, finding a supplier for them, and making arrangements for collections by a national company we have never dealt with before.”
Chair of Care Forum Wales Mario Kreft has called on the Welsh Government to back the social care sector by affording private care homes the same grace window as the NHS.
“They’ve given the NHS in Wales two years to comply with this change but care homes, which have just staggered out of four years of pandemic, don’t even get a year to adjust,” he said. “They’ve been through this dreadful pandemic and kept hospitals functioning by taking hundreds of people off their hands and into the community so we need the minister Julie James to tell us why there is an exemption for the NHS.
“The cost will be enormous but it is okay to put that on care homes who will have to increase their fees and take on more responsibility.
“Fairness dictates the social care sector should undoubtedly be treated in the same way. There is also going to be a heavy cost in terms of staff time and it will impact care homes in the same way as hospitals
“All of this comes at a time when care homes are struggling with other unnecessary changes after the pandemic on top of suffering the effects of chronic underfunding by councils and health boards for decades.
“The sector has suffered enough – it’s on its knees. This is not a kind or intelligent thing to do.”
A spokesman for the Welsh Government said: “The new law will require workplaces to separate key recyclable materials the way households already do across most of Wales. Thanks to a ‘Team Wales’ effort our high rate of household recycling saves us around 400,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.
“The regulations will help ensure that workplaces can now also play their part in addressing the climate and nature emergency, and be able to benefit from potential savings, by becoming more resource-efficient.”