On 24 July, Suffolk County Council’s Cabinet approved a plan to pump £6million into upgrading Suffolk’s recycling centres.
The plan has earmarked £3m for the Foxhall Recycling Centre – Suffolk’s busiest with 20% of all recycling waste in the county – and £1m for Haverhill for “urgent improvements”. The plans will see improvements to traffic access at Foxhall and measures to prevent people from having to climb steps to dispose of their waste in the containers. Existing planning permission for work expires in March 2021.
At Haverhill, the site has to be closed when containers are emptied because of space, so the funding aims to double the size of the site and prevent such closures.
Elsewhere £1m has been earmarked for a site to replace the Portman’s Walk Recycling Centre in Ipswich town centre, and a further million for the same in Stowmarket.
The existing Ipswich and Stowmarket sites are considered to be severely constrained for space, with no expansion opportunities available and the surrounding roads not offering a safe area to queue onto the facility.
Detailed designs and planning applications will be drawn up this year, with the aim of securing land sites and carrying out necessary ecology and archaeology work this year as well. Construction for improvements is expected to get underway in 2019/20.