After a month of a new waste collection calendar, the Bruxelles-Propreté agency estimates that there have been "encouraging" results.
Between 15 May and 15 June, the agency collected 1,097 tonnes of waste from orange bags, RTBF reports.
For the same time period last year, the agency collected 463 tonnes of garbage from orange bags. This marks a 137% increase in the use of food waste bags since they became mandatory on 15 May.
Due to the reform, the region also provides food sorting containers for residents, free of charge. According to Bruxelles-Propreté (ABP), requests for these containers also saw a spike.
“By the end of the year, 300,000 bins will have been provided to residents since 2016, including around 100,000 this year,” said Adel Lassouli, press relations officer at ABP.
The rollout of the reform is not without difficulty, however. After the collection calendar changed in May, agents from ABP went around the streets of Brussels to place stickers on trash bags that were taken out at the wrong time. The stickers had an "error" message and contained a QR code leading to the new calendar.
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In the first week of the reform, up to 16,000 of these stickers were placed on waste bags. The next week 8,000 stickers were used.
The ABP still has to measure whether the increase in the use of orange bags led to a decrease in the residual waste (collected in white bags).
