Council to reduce recycling collections to every three weeks

[Allshallbewell2021]

I saw this in the fine print coming to us for spring 2025.

Fortnightly for black bins and every three weeks for recycling.

I get it - they're all completely broke.

yeah, i live in medway Kent

We only get monthly recycling collections and we have to separate them out into glass, metal, cardboard etc.

Our council did the same few years ago - our "big" bin for a family of 5 with 3 week collections is actually a normal bin in most places and the size we had prior.

It had meant for years though anything that might be taken for recycling is put out for it - so suppose that will increase curb side collection though perhaps not item compliance. We at hover at 67% recycling at our council and have to reach 70% to avoid fines by next year from welsh government.

They want you anxious and worrying about bin day as an anxious population is easier to control.

Ours is 4 weekly. Only way our family of 5 manage is by washing and crushing each and every single bit of recycling. Every paper is torn up and every bottle is squashed completely flat. It is doable if you go the extra mile.

General waste which includes food (because they don't have that separate yet) is fortnightly and paper/cardboard is collected every 4 weeks and plastic /metal is 4 weeks too.

And glass needs to be taken to either the town tip or to the one set of glass banks in the centre of the small town.

It'd be nice if we got a discount for the reduced services provided!

Because people would put dog 💩💩 in them. Awful for the sorters.

Would be good if the supermarkets were held to account re packaging.

We don’t have much recycling or rubbish now, just DH and me. The shared houses our DDs are in, Uni cities, though there’s clearly more. It’s visible with overflowing bins. One city doesn’t do food waste so that goes in the black bins.

Ours is currently recycling and food waste weekly and the black bin every 3 weeks.

All of ours are 4 weekly here and have been for years except garden/food waste which is fortnightly. We're a family of 4 including 1 in nappies and get by though it's especially difficult around Christmas when they skip some collections altogether so you have to wait 8 weeks at a time when you've more rubbish than ever!

Upping council tax charging for bin collection and cutting the service down. Pretty much sums up our shit state of a country. Yay rats and maggots !! Roll on summer !

We need to completely rethink our relationship with refuse, landfill waste is the third largest source of methane released into the atmosphere
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20240402-the-surprising-sources-of-methane

and plastics recycling is not great either - 90% is dumped or incinerated (globally)

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/environment-plastic-oil-recycling/

1.86 million tonnes of non recycled plastic waste per year in the UK.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmenvfru/22/report.html

none of these methods are succeeding and we are all suffering as a result.

you’re crazy if you think the thing to worry about is the smell of bins! It’s so much worse than that!

i think councils should be encouraging less rubbish. If people are filling bins on a weekly basis, surely they need to try and reduce waste, not complain islets not collected often. It’s only moved from you house, it doesn’t just ‘disappear’

For about the last 3 years all our bins and recycling have been done every 3 weeks.
We have a green bin for general rubbish, a box for glass, a pink bin for tins and plastics and a blue one for paper and card.

In spite of everybody moaning, it all works perfectly well - there's no smell or rubbish piling up in the streets.

You’re a lot less likely to get maggots if you keep any scraps of meat or fish in a bag in the freezer until the night before the bin men come. Apparently bluebottles can smell anything dead (so any meat or fish) from a mile away.

😂

We have 3 weekly collections and it's fine, general waste could go longer tbh. It amazes me all the councils have different systems, you'd think there would be some cost benefit to standardising them across the country... anyway, we have 3 bins (waste, plastic, paper), food and batteries are collected weekly, glass we have to do ourselves.

Our neighbours rubbish/ recycling has overflowed from the day they moved in, we're amazed how much a small household can have. They complain constantly about the 3 week cycle, about having to sort their recycling (something they have never managed to grasp so the bins don't get emptied and the problem worse), it hasn't been a problem for anyone else and we all have similar sized households.

Yeah, well....
Fly tipping, anti social use of other people's bins, unless they are locked or stored away....
In my country, trash is emptied every day except Sunday.
What a fool - me - to marry and move to the UK 20 years ago.
Time to get out again.
🙂

My council are going from weekly to fortnightly later this year. This is both general and recycling. It will alternate

The main problem which will affect 95% of residents is that the general wheelie bin is 140 litres - the thin narrow bin. If you have 2 plus more people in your household, the general bin will be overflowing. At Christmas/NY, those who miss their collection - they can have 3 black bin bags.

Yet my CT has gone up by £6 (band A single adult) and my parents up by £21 (band D) a month

YABU in my opinion.

Round here they've been on 3 weekly collections for the recycling for donkeys years.

We have 4 bins.

One for a weekly food/garden waste collection.

2 of the others are collected every 3 weeks. These bins are for glass and plastic in one; paper in the other.

The general rubbish bin is collected fortnightly.

Works really well. They even did a bin swap thing where the larger general rubbish bin was swapped for the smaller recycling one. So it forced people to recycle because the glass and plastic bin is now our largest one.

Once you get used to it, you'll see its a great idea.

That ..is extremely accurate.
Thank you.

Ou council is changing to 3 weeks for general waste wheelie bin.
Garden waste is changing from monthly to fortnightly and we are now being charged for that.
Recycling and food waste is every week. But we do not have a wheelie bin for that, we have stupid plastic boxes which blow away if it’s a windy night which happens alot here in Scotland. They also break due to the refuse collectors throwing them onto the pavement.
People have petitioned the council asking for a wheelie bin for recycling but they claim the boxes work and it would cost too much to change to wheelie bins.
I have to get new boxes at least twice a year due to breakage or blowing away.

Mine is general waste (black wheelie bin) weekly and recycling (green wheelie bin )fortnightly.

There are food waste bins as well which are emptied weekly.

We are still weekly (south east), apparently our recycling collection is changing later this year but think it will still be weekly.

Caspianberg · Today 12:13
i think councils should be encouraging less rubbish. If people are filling bins on a weekly basis, surely they need to try and reduce waste, not complain islets not collected often. It’s only moved from you house, it doesn’t just ‘disappear’

yes it’s still in the world. Often shipped to a third world country and piled high. It’s hard to reduce waste, most things that make our lives easier and make it possible to work full time etc involve plastics. We can’t all be Amish and grow our own oats. There must be simple changes that big companies can make, like plastic bottle collection funded by drinks companies.

Whoa. I'm so shocked at some of these. Ours is weekly for recycling and fortnightly for general waste.