Next year, the Council will make a final decision about the new household waste contract. Whatever the outcome, I hope that it includes part of the current system in neighbouring Calderdale – the weekly collection of food waste in a separate container.

This practice is spreading, and currently 47 out 350 local councils collect food waste separately, and weekly, with another 20 planning to do so.

The reason for this is the need to reduce the amount of domestic waste thrown away in landfill sites, as they are filling up and becoming very expensive indeed – currently taxed at £48 per tonne and rising to £80 per tonne from 2014.

An EU directive also insists that we reduce the amount of landfill or face considerable fines because organic matter in oxygen-free landfill sites produces methane, a very serious climate-change gas.

It’s frustrating that we should even have such a problem as food waste, but if we do have any left-overs, we need to use it positively, and that requires collecting it separately.

A useful result is that our big wheeled bins won’t contain any smelly or putrid waste so they will only need emptying once a fortnight, thus allowing alternative weekly collections – household waste one week and recyclable materials the next. It’s cost-effective and raises the percentage of waste recycled to much more than 50 per cent in many cases.

The food waste, though, can be put to very good use once it’s collected separately from the rest of the waste and this is in the production of energy, either as gas directly into the grid or as a heating source for making electricity, again for the grid, or local use.

It can even be used to make autogas, that is compressed natural gas, CNG, and as it isn’t a fossil fuel it wouldn’t add more CO2 to the atmosphere.

All it needs is very simple and well-proved technology – an anaerobic digester, a sealed structure that allows the organic material to break down without oxygen so producing methane, natural gas, that doesn’t have to be imported from Qatar or Russia.

The ideal situation is when local people set up their own scheme, provide the capital by buying shares and then sell the gas to the grid, or produce electricity. They can then benefit from the income from their potato peelings, dead daffodils and left-over sprouts.

In the same way that Settle raised the funds for its hydro-electric scheme, a local Bradford community could decide to produce its own power and reduce its carbon footprint.

Now that would be a promising resolution for the new year.