Household waste recycling centres

• Alsager, Crewe, Macclesfield and Knutsford  HWRCs will remain open.
• A 'meet and greet system' has been introduced to enable a smooth experience for anyone visiting the site
• We will be introducing automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras  - they will help us to ensure fair use at all our sites. 
• The mobile HWRC will be retained, and from October the service will be expanded to target 8 areas where residents are not within a 20-minute drive time of a HWRC site, or to areas where data indicates that incidents of fly tipping are at an increased level
• The booking system for visiting HWRCs at peak times – during weekends and bank holidays – will be retained to manage people’s waiting times and to encourage greater use of the sites during weekdays and later in the day
• The HWRCs will be open for an extra hour – until 6pm – seven days a week from April to September. 

We want to deliver a service that enables residents to recycle and dispose of their waste responsibly but is also within the limits of what is affordable over the coming years. 

This is in the context of needing to reduce spending by £100 million over the next four years, while continuing to support those who need help the most across the borough.  

Forecasting for this year already shows that the financial pressure is rising further.

In Cheshire East, we currently provide one of the highest levels of  HWRC provision per 100,000 of the population in the country, and we provide the longest opening hours for our customers in comparison to most other councils.

We understand that the option of reducing the number of permanent HWRC sites was not supported through feedback from a public consultation held about the proposals earlier this year. However, keeping services as they are now is simply not affordable.

Each of our 7 household waste recycling centres needs investment to bring them up to modern standards to comply with new safety regulations – amounting to more than £1.2m in total.

This investment is in addition to the significant annual maintenance and running costs of these sites, which continue to rise.

We encourage people to reduce and reuse their waste and unwanted goods, and to use their silver bin to recycle as much of their waste as possible.

If you have items you need to dispose of, there are a number of other places locally that you can take your waste and recycling.

It is a statutory requirement that councils provide the public with reasonable access to household waste recycling centres. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) provides national guidelines for local authority management of HWRCs .

WRAP guidelines suggest that the maximum driving times to a HWRC for the great majority of residents should be 20 minutes in urban areas and 30 minutes in rural areas.

It is not possible for us to provide individual HWRCs in all 14 of our towns or large villages – the cost would be too prohibitive, and this level of provision is not required by law. 

We closely monitor fly-tipping as part of information passed to central government, published though the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

Importantly, fly-tipping is a crime and an offence under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. Conviction could lead to a heavy fine. You can report fly-tipping though our street cleansing, litter and flytipping page.