Peterborough City Council (PCC) says residents diverted 4,500 tonnes of food waste from the general refuse stream across 2025, according to the council’s Annual Waste Services Report announced in early February 2026. The milestone forms part of the city’s Climate Change Action Plan and helps Peterborough prepare to meet national rules requiring separate food waste collections by March 2026.
The collections are run by Aragon Direct Services, the council-owned waste services operator, which provides food waste collection to nearly 90,000 households across the Peterborough unitary authority area. Residents use small silver kitchen caddies that are emptied into larger grey outdoor caddies for weekly kerbside collection.
The council says collected food waste is sent to an anaerobic digestion (AD) facility where it is processed to produce biogas (used to generate renewable electricity) and a nutrient-rich digestate that can be used as an agricultural fertiliser. PCC and its contractors argue that processing food waste via the AD route is cheaper than disposing of mis-binned food in black residual bins, and the council has previously cited local figures showing the cost of food in black bins is substantial.
Despite the 2025 progress, PCC found that nearly a third of the average black bin still contains food that could have been recycled. To tackle that shortfall, the council launched an awareness campaign called “Feed the Caddy” on February 5, 2026, urging households to use their indoor silver caddies for food scraps so the city can meet its participation targets and long-term environmental goals.
