Crawley Borough Council is to spend £3m on a new fleet of bin lorries.
The money for the vehicles, which will be able to use bio-fuels as well as fossil fuels, was approved during a meeting of the full council on Wednesday (March 29).
Some £1.6m will be taken from the Refuse Vehicle Replacement Reserve, with £180,000 coming from the Waste and Recycling Reserve and £1.22m from the Capital Programme Reserve.
The new fleet is expected to be on the road from February 2024.
Members of the Conservative group said they were disappointed that fuels such as hydrogen – as used by some of the Metrobus fleet – and electricity were not on the table.
But Gurinder Jhans, cabinet member for environment, sustainability & climate change, said such technology was ‘still in its infancy and very expensive’.
Leader Michael Jones added:
“There are issues around power supply up at County Oak/Metcalf Way.
“Just installing electric vehicle installations is not necessarily the most straightforward thing.
“That is the National Grid’s fault, not ours.”
Mr Jones also criticised the length of time being taken for the government to update it’s National Waste Strategy.
Until it does, no local authority can be 100 per cent sure what there statutory obligations will be when it comes to rubbish and recycling collections later down the line.
The council’s contract with Biffa expires on January 31 2024 and it was agreed to extend it by 26 months to March 31 2026, which Mr Jones said should give the government time to sort out the strategy.
He added:
“The delay by the government is genuinely tremendously frustrating.
“We can’t plan in the ways we want while the government continues to drag its feet over the National Waste Strategy.
“One of the reasons we’re having to go to this extension is precisely because we have not been able to plan for something longer-term – because we simply don’t know whether it would be enough.
“It would cost us even more to change should the government come up with something [else].”
He assured the meeting that the collections services would remain as they are, with refuse collected weekly and recycling and green waste fortnightly.
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