The closure of a Dundee tip has almost doubled the amount of garden waste being dumped in Monifieth’s recycling site.
The volume of bulky garden debris deposited at the Angus Council facility has shot up since Dundee closed the garden skips at Baldovie as a cost-saving measure.
The closure and the shutting of the recycling site at Marchbanks left householders in the east of the city with the option of taking their cut trees and shrubbery to Riverside if they wanted to use a city council site.
However, that involves an expensive round trip of up to 15 miles and, according to environmentalists, unnecessary car journeys producing more pollution.
Their other option was to cross the border into Angus and use the much closer recycling site at Monifieth and that seems to be what they have done.
Figures provided by Angus Council show in the first quarter of this financial year, from the start of April to the end of June, 171.2 tonnes of waste has been dropped at the Monifieth site. In the same period of last year the site took 89.94 tonnes.
Angus neighbourhood services convener Donald Morrison said: “We expected more people to do this because of the budget constraints in Dundee and we have no problem with this just now. We will keep the situation under review.
“I understand dealing with the greater volume of garden waste will not cost us much more money than we are already spending and it will actually help our recycling rates as we recycle our garden waste for composting.”
A spokesman for Dundee City Council said: “The overall amount of garden waste processed at the city’s composting site at Riverside has increased slightly on the same period last year, although the amount of garden waste delivered to the Riverside Recycling Centre has reduced.
“That reduction is due in part to an increase in the number of requests for brown recycling bins, which allow householders to have their garden waste collected at the kerbside.
“This method of recycling is more economic for householders.”