A great recycling leap forward?

Good afternoon readers — and welcome to this week’s Monday briefing.

Sheffield may have a reputation as the greenest city in the UK but, at least when it comes to our recycling, we’re not living up to it. In our experience, many local residents don’t even realise how little plastic the city’s waste company Veolia actually recycles: only plastic bottles, including spray bottles, can go in your brown bin. Every year, Sheffield residents put around 1,500 tonnes of waste in these bins that won’t be recycled — more or less twice the weight of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue. Thankfully, big changes are coming to how we recycle in Sheffield, but do the changes go far enough? That’s today’s big story.

As well as that, we have a possible cabinet comeback for a local MP, a new exhibition inspired by Graves Gallery’s archive, and a doer-upper in Pitsmoor.

In case you missed it

For our weekend read, Dan spoke to Sheffield’s last lockkeeper — one of only a handful of residential lockkeepers left across the country. Dave Walker, 68, has been looking after the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal for 36 years and, when he does finally retire, the Canal and River Trust have made it clear they won’t hire a replacement, instead relying on a team of volunteers. “It’s not really a job, it’s a way of life,” he told Dan. “I can go to bed at night and listen to the water coming over that lock and know if I’ve got enough.” (If you want to find out more about the city’s historic canal, consider joining one of these regular walking tours.)

Earlier in the week, we reported on the council’s decision to forge ahead with Event Central — the 200-capacity venue it is creating on Fargate — despite the cost of renovation works going from under £7 million to more than £14m. An insider source familiar with the early days of the project described the new budget as “absolutely bonkers,” adding: “We could build a brand new block of flats for £14m.” And we also exclusively revealed that police have reopened an investigation into historic sex offences at Mount St Mary’s College, the private Catholic school that closed at the end of July, after “new information came to light relating to the identity of one of the alleged suspects”.

Editor’s note: We’ve got some great stories coming up this week, including a piece by our regular contributor David Bocking about the history of health food shopping in the city, and another by Dan looking at the controversial Streets Ahead contract which has now reached the half way stage of its 25 year long run.

The big picture: Mural city 🏙️

The first Lick of Paint street art festival took place in Sheffield over the weekend. Dozens of new murals have appeared all over the city including at Fitzalan Square, the Wicker, Kelham Island Museum, Neepsend and Netherthorpe. This colourful mural captured by Sheffield photographer Our Steven was the result of a workshop run by Oskar With A K on Waingate.

The big story: A great recycling leap forward?

Top line: Recycling in Sheffield is about to be revamped, once major changes are approved by councillors this week. Thanks to national legislation introduced in 2021, local waste company Veolia, which currently only recycles plastic bottles, will have to accept a much wider range of plastic. Residents across the city will also receive new, larger blue bins for their paper and card recycling.

New legislation: The Environment Act 2021 specified a list of materials that every English council must recycle, including glass, metal, plastic, paper and card, food waste and garden waste.

• The full list includes some items not currently recycled by Sheffield’s waste company Veolia, including plastic pots, tubs and trays, plastic tubes, aerosols and foil, cartons and plastic films.
• The council must make sure all the listed materials are being recycled by 31st March next year, with the exception of plastic films, which Veolia must begin recycling by the same date in 2027. 

What do you want? A bigger blue bin: In September last year, as it prepared to comply with the new law, Sheffield Council consulted residents on what they would change about the local recycling system — and over 10,000 people got in touch. Again and again, residents said their existing blue bin was filling up faster than it could be collected. As a result, in March next year, the current 140-litre blue bin will be replaced by a 240-litre blue bin.

Black bins will still be collected every two weeks, while the brown and blue bins will be collected every four. However, households will also be able to request additional recycling capacity if they need it. 

What happens to our waste? Putting things in the right bins is just the first part of the recycling process. As we found in our piece about the life-cycle of Sheffield’s waste, what happens to our recycling after it gets taken away is sometimes more complex.

• Material put in the blue bins, which amounted 15,000 tonnes in 2021/22, is initially sent to the council’s materials recycling facility in Beighton, where it is sorted into the various paper grades and then sold on to reprocessors at the going market rate.
• The brown bins are sorted in Alfreton in Derbyshire, before being sent onto different facilities. Steel cans are recycled in Attercliffe, while aluminium cans and plastic bottles go to Warrington. What happens to the glass remains a mystery, however.

Burn, baby burn: As the graph above shows, most of our waste ends up in the black bin, and the vast majority of this is burned in the Energy Recovery Centre on Bernard Road, or, as everyone else calls it, the incinerator. The amount of “mixed plastics” that Veolia actually recycles each year is distressingly small. In The Tribune’s anecdotal experience, many residents aren’t even aware that plastic bottles are the only kind of plastic that can be recycled in Sheffield — perhaps understandably, given a far wider range of plastic is recycled elsewhere. Every year, residents put around 1,500 tonnes of waste in their bins that won’t be recycled — more or less twice the weight of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue. 

Once Veolia is forced to recycle other plastics, it should do wonders for the city’s dismally low recycling rate. In 2021/22, we recycled just 34% of the waste we produced that year, compared to a national average of 42%. 

However, it’s not all good news. Last year, the council voted to postpone introducing a food waste recycling scheme, potentially until 2038. Many believe much of this waste could be used for composting, but it will continue to be burned for the foreseeable future.

Our take: Bins have long been a political football, with parties promising to reinstate weekly collections in the hope that it will help them grab a few more votes come election time. If councillors can agree on this way forward, it could take some of the heat out of the issue — and hopefully out of our atmosphere. The vast majority of us want to recycle, and the council’s role should be to make doing so easier. These proposed changes are an important step in the right direction.

Your Tribune briefing 🗞️

🗳️ Could Sheffield Heeley MP Louise Haigh be due for a cabinet comeback? A centre-left network called Mainstream — aiming to change Labour’s direction and backed by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham — is reportedly supporting her in the party’s upcoming deputy leadership contest, after Angela Rayner was forced to resign. Burnham told the Guardian that Haigh and Mainstream’s other preferred candidate Lucy Powell, the former Commons leader, both “represent the centre of gravity” for the party. Haigh was previously Starmer's Transport Secretary but resigned last November, after it emerged she had pleaded guilty to a fraud offence a decade ago. 

⚽ Former Sheffield Wednesday manager Danny Röhl spoke to the Sunday Times about the trials and tribulations of working for one of the country’s most embattled clubs. “Some people said, ‘If you survived Wednesday then you learnt a lot.’” Röhl was only 34 when he replaced Xisco Muñoz in October 2023 and had to deal with unusable training grounds, which forced the team to practice on university grounds and artificial turf, and an owner who insisted on conducting transfer and contract negotiations personally. He insists that he stayed devoted to the team until the bitter end: “If someone speaks about my attitude, that something changed, it’s completely wrong. What changed in the second half of the season was not me but the mood at the club.”

🏗️ Rotherham Council has been advised to scrap their draft Local Plan and consider building on the green belt, after the government increased their housing target from 544 to 1,111 new homes a year. Meanwhile in Sheffield, the furore over plans to build homes on the green belt rages on, after a local farmer told councillors they were putting her home and business at risk. At a full council meeting last week, Adele Riddle of Town End Farm in Ecclesfield said no amount of compensation would make up for the loss of her farm, adding: “It will be over my dead body if they get a bulldozer to build.”

This week’s weather 🌥️

Our weather forecast comes from dedicated Sheffield weather service Steel City Skies, who say this week will remain changeable and largely unsettled with sunshine and heavy showers.

Monday 🌦️ Breezy from the SW but often pleasant with sunny spells and a few afternoon showers to dodge. Highs of 21C.

Tuesday ⛅️ Showers more isolated, with most places staying dry and fine with good spells of sunshine. Light S winds with highs of 21C.

Wednesday 🌦️ Unsettled and breezy with bright spells and the likelihood of showers or longer spells of rain. Highs of 20C.

Thursday 🌦️ Further heavy and potentially thundery showers, with brief brighter spells. Windy from the SW with highs of 18C.

Friday 🌦️ Remaining unsettled and cooler with scattered showers or spells of rain in between brief drier slots. Staying breezy with highs of 18C.

Outlook: Cool and unsettled as low pressure churns up further showers in between bright spells for the weekend, too.

To see the full forecast and keep up to date with any changes to the outlook, follow Steel City Skies on Facebook.

The weekly Whitworth ✍️

Cartoonist James Whitworth with his take on Event Central and the council’s battle to convince people that the new Fargate venue will be value for money.

Home of the week 🏡

This stunning five bedroom Victorian semi in Pitsmoor needs a bit of work, but could be a beautiful home with sensitive restoration and a bit of TLC. With three spacious downstairs rooms, four large double bedrooms and a gorgeous wooden staircase in the hall, this one of a kind home has to be seen to be fully appreciated. It is on the market for just £220,000.

Things to do 📆

Tour 🏛️ On Tuesday, join Sheffield Museums to discover the history and stories behind some of the oldest and biggest buildings on Sheffield’s skyline on this Big Builds walking tour of the city centre. On the tour you’ll visit a selection of buildings erected from the 15th century to the present day and learn some fun facts and stories about each one. The 90-minute tour costs £10 and will set off from the Millennium Gallery foyer at 2pm.

Music 🪕 On Thursday at The Greystones pub in S11, catch up and coming alt-folk act the Heather Ferrier Trio. With “captivating musicianship” and a sound that is unapologetically her own, accordionist Ferrier is changing the perceptions of alt-folk, not least through her “extraordinary” northern clog dancing, which reportedly went down a storm at a packed Bridgewater Hall in Manchester last year. Tickets are priced £13 and doors open at 7.30pm.

Art 🖼️ Also on Thursday, hear New York based artist Liliane Tomasko discusses her new exhibition The Psyche of the Portrait, in which she has created a series of works inspired by paintings and sculpture displayed in the Graves Gallery. Hear about how Tomasko selected images from the museum’s visual art collection and went about creating original new pieces in response. The free 45-minute talk takes place at the Millennium Gallery and starts at 1pm.