Welwyn Hatfield Community Housing Trust has recently teamed up with local company, Waste King to help Hatfield residents recycle unwanted items.

The ‘waste not, want not’ event was held over a whole Saturday. Waste King provided a waste collection cage for the day, and the Trust invited residents from across the Hillfield area of Hatfield to bring along rubbish and any other items they no longer had use for. Chair of the Trust, Paul Wren said: “We chose Hillfield because there had been some problems with fly tipping there, which is costly to dispose of. By taking a proactive approach and enabling residents to get rid of rubbish easily, we hope this will reduce future problems. The money saved on cleaning up the area can be put to much better use, to improve this and other parts of the borough.”

“The day also turned into something of a community event. The innovative waste cage attracted a huge amount of interest, and in the end residents were not only bringing along their rubbish but also volunteering to help sort it – and the Street Wardens and local Police Community Support Officers also joined in!”

Waste cages are a cheaper and more environmentally friendly way of disposal than skips and other methods, allowing people to separate different types of waste out for recycling, but also see if there are any items someone else has thrown away but they could make use of. Waste King’s Managing Director, Glen Currie explained: “During the day there was some ‘instant recycling’ – where one resident’s rubbish proved to be just the thing that someone else was looking for – but in the end we removed 4.6 tonnes of rubbish from the day’s collection. The event was a great success: residents had a great time helping us segregate the rubbish in the cage, which also meant we were able to recycle 97% of everything collected.”

Following the success of this event the Trust, with Waste King will be inviting residents to ‘waste not, want not’ in other areas of Welwyn Hatfield too.