FAMILIES in Southend are helping to make the new food recycling scheme a huge success as 60 tonnes of food a week is being steered away from landfill.

The scheme to collect food waste including vegetable peelings, egg shells and leftover food started on September 29 and has already proved popular with residents in the borough.

Homes have been given blue plastic kitchen caddies and larger bins which are put out for collection.

Council contractor, Cory Environmental, carries out the weekly doorstep collection across the borough along with recylable waste such as cardboard and glass in pink sacks, materials and old clothes in white sacks and any other unrecyclable rubbish in black bags.

Ian Robertson, councillor responsible for public protection and waste, said: “It really is great news that we’re recycling 60 tonnes of food waste a week.

“That’s 60 tonnes a week not going into landfill sites, producing harmful methane gases.

“We are extremely grateful to the residents of Southend for their enthusiastic response to our food recycling scheme and would ask people to keep up the excellent work.”

At the moment the bins are not available to those living in high rise flats but in the coming months the council says it will be working to introduce these residents to the scheme.

The food waste collection service is vital to helping the council meet its recycling and composting target of 60 per cent in 2015.

All the food waste collected goes to a composting facility in Cambridge, where temperature, moisture and air-flow are carefully controlled for the best composting conditions.

Once composted, the former food waste is used for agricultural purposes and land restoration projects and may even be used to generate electricity.

The service prevents large amounts of food waste ending up in landfill sites where it will decompose, producing methane, a gas contributing to climate change.

National studies show that households throw away around 6.7million tonnes of food every year – which amounts to one out of every three bags of shopping bought.