Surrey Waste Partnership are reviewing their Plan for Waste Management in Surrey and want you to help shape it. Please take part in their public consultation between 17 May and 12 August 2010 and tell them your views.

Do mention the need to encourage waste reduction, in the first instance, and the requirement for plastic recycling collection, perhaps in place of the now removed bottle banks. This could be provided by Recresco, who currently just collect Tetra Paks.

Compost Works' Hugh Baker is holding a meeting at 7.30pm on Monday 15th March at 8 The Drive, Fetcham KT22 9EN, to plan for the year ahead.

Open to all, whether you'd like to volunteer to help at one of their events, want to get advice for your group or to find out how composting might fit in with your activity, or you're simply interested in composting.

With local food production being a key issue of Transition Town and Community Garden groups, Compost Works plays a vital role by providing expertise. On a more practical note, it's shredder hire service continues to be a boon (and money saver) to those of us who like to prune!

Surrey County Council (SCC) announced in December that there are no longer plans to build Energy from Waste incinerators in Surrey. Instead they are planning an Eco Park in Shepperton that will have an anaerobic digester (AD) to handle all Surrey’s domestic food waste. SCC is already working with the District and Borough Councils on separate food collections which should be operating throughout the county by the time the digester is ready.

This is good news of course, but is it the best option? The Green Mole Forum has set up a group to study this and we have met the SCC manager responsible for developing these plans. We learnt that SCC has only studied a single site to handle all of Surrey’s domestic food waste, but agreed there are viable alternatives that they have not studied properly. Importantly they haven’t considered having a number of local AD plants instead of one big plant, nor have they considered commercial food waste or farm waste as a possible feedstock for the plants. Smaller plants have a number of advantages including:

We have recently taken a big step forward by commissioning a student at Surrey University's Centre for Environment Strategy (CES) to carry out a thorough study of large versus local AD plants. Using Life Cycle Analysis, a study technique for which CES has an international reputation, it'll work out the best environmental option and will be her MSc project.

An important early part of the work will be collecting data from Mole Valley’s cafes, pubs, sandwich shops, school canteens, etc. to estimate how much commercial food waste is produced. SCC estimate that it could be about the same quantity as the total domestic food waste.

The recent leaf bag distribution events in Dorking and Leatherhead proved very sucessful with nearly 500 bags, large and small, and around 150 second-hand bags being handed out. As leaves take up to 2 years to compost it is important to keep them separate from kitchen and other garden waste.

Congratulations to Hugh Baker, of Compost Works, and his volunteers for a job well done. Thanks must also go to Surrey County Council who provided a lot of the bags. If you missed out you might find that SCC still has some left over, so check out the Compost Works website for where you may still get them.

Compost Works will be giving away FREE jumbo bags, to make your own leaf mould, this Saturday (October 31st) in St Martin's Walk, Dorking and next Saturday (November 7th) in Leatherhead High Street.

No work is involved, you just fill the bags with leaves, leave them for 18 months or so and the result is a friable, low-nutrient compost. This is ideal as a mulch, to make seed compost or to incorporate in soil to improve the texture.

For more information on this, or composting in general, and to find other places where you can get the bags, check out their recently updated website.