The council says its green recycling bags cost about £300,000 and saved about £525,000 in clear sacks, a net £225,000. They are withdrawn from 12 October. The Lib Dems called them £250,000 headed for the bin.

Sevenoaks District Council has put a price on the green reusable recycling bags it is about to withdraw. They cost about £300,000 to buy and deliver, and the council says they will have saved about £525,000 by not buying and delivering clear sacks, leaving a net saving of about £225,000. (Sevenoaks District Council, The Facts: Green Recycling Bags To Save Taxpayers £225,000)

The statement, headed “The Facts”, was published on Monday 24 August. It does not say who it is answering. In April the council’s Liberal Democrat group called the bags “£250,000 bags headed for the bin”. (Sevenoaks Liberal Democrats, Broken promises, missed deadlines and £250,000 bags headed for the bin?)

The council’s figures

The council’s release sets out these numbers, all of them described as approximate:

  • £300,000: the cost of purchasing and distributing the bags
  • £525,000: the projected saving on clear recycling sacks by the time the wheelie bin service starts
  • £225,000: the resulting net saving
  • more than four million single-use clear sacks avoided
  • around 30,000 miles of annual sack delivery journeys no longer needed
  • 3.5%: the rise in the district’s recycling rate the council attributes to the bags
  • around £10,000: the expected income from recycling returned bags, to offset a “small cost” of collecting them

(Sevenoaks District Council, The Facts: Green Recycling Bags To Save Taxpayers £225,000)

Bar chart of the council's green bag figures: £300,000 cost, £525,000 saved on clear sacks, £225,000 net saving, £10,000 from recycling returned bags, with the Lib Dem claim of £250,000 and the 2024 Cabinet figure of 57,000 bags noted beneath
Chart by Sevenoaks Online

The council says a final figure for the total savings will be published once it has been confirmed. The £225,000 is a projection, not an audited result.

Where the bags came from

The decision dates from the council’s budget meeting on 20 February 2024. The budget replaced clear sacks with reusable “sacks for life” from 2024/25, with a saving of around £200,000 a year from the second year. (Sevenoaks District Council, Recycling Reusable Sacks (Sacks for Life) Update, Cabinet 18 July 2024)

That Cabinet paper gives the specification and the order:

  • a 190-litre weighted bag, 55cm by 55cm by 63cm, with a Velcro lid and a white panel for the house number
  • 57,000 bags ordered from Sackmaker, leaving around 5,000 in stock for replacements after distribution
  • delivery to households from autumn 2024, round by round

(Sevenoaks District Council, Recycling Reusable Sacks (Sacks for Life) Update, Cabinet 18 July 2024)

The council announced the change in February 2024 alongside the end of free black waste sacks. The then Cabinet Member for Cleaner and Greener, Cllr Margot McArthur, said the council was “the last in the country to supply residents with waste sacks”. (Sevenoaks District Council, Council protects waste collection service, 28 February 2024)

Why they are going

The bags are being withdrawn because of the Government’s national waste rules, which the council says were clarified in 2025 and require simpler collections with less manual handling for crews. The council introduced the bags while it was still waiting for those rules and working out its future collection service. (Sevenoaks District Council, The Facts: Green Recycling Bags To Save Taxpayers £225,000)

The replacement is the wheelie bin service. Most households get a 240-litre green-lidded recycling bin and a 180-litre black bin, with collections moving to alternate weeks and glass collected at the kerb for the first time, from Monday 12 October 2026. We covered the rollout in Sevenoaks wheelie bins from October. (Sevenoaks District Council, Wheelie bins)

The Lib Dem challenge

The Liberal Democrat group’s April statement made three claims about the bags. It said the council handed out 49,000 of them between September and December 2024 at a cost of £250,000, that every one would be made redundant by the wheelie bins, and that there was “currently no plan for what residents should do with them”. The group’s leader, Cllr Alan Leaman, said the Conservatives had “spent £250,000 of your money on bags that will be obsolete in months”. (Sevenoaks Liberal Democrats, Broken promises, missed deadlines and £250,000 bags headed for the bin?)

Set against Monday’s release:

  • The council’s cost figure, £300,000, is higher than the Lib Dems’ £250,000, but the council counts distribution as well as purchase.
  • The council does not dispute that the bags are being withdrawn. Its case is that they paid for themselves before that happened.
  • There is now a stated plan for the bags: keep them, or hand them back for recycling in a collection from early 2027, with details promised later this year. (Sevenoaks District Council, Wheelie bins)

Neither side has published the working behind its figures. The council’s release gives totals, not the number of bags distributed or the unit price of a clear sack, and it says the final saving is still to be confirmed.

What it means for you

  • Keep using the green bag until 12 October. Recycling goes in the wheelie bins only from that date.
  • You do not have to return the bag. The council says you can keep it for your own use. If you want rid of it, a temporary collection will run from early 2027, and the council will say how later this year.
  • Do not put it in the black bin. The council plans to recycle the returned bags and expects around £10,000 from doing so.
  • Check your own street on the council’s wheelie bins page for delivery dates and the new calendar, and see our Sevenoaks bin collection days page for the current rounds and what goes where.

For the wider record of what the council has decided this year, see Sevenoaks council decisions.

Sources

Image: Recycling site, Suffolk Way, Sevenoaks, by N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Recycling_site,Suffolk_Way-geograph.org.uk-_2183727.jpg. Chart by Sevenoaks Online.