Changes to rubbish collections

The Council is making changes to the way it collects your rubbish and recyclables. We expect the changes to result in a more efficient service that saves time and fuel.

We need to reduce our costs in response to public spending reductions, so will no longer collect rubbish three times a week as we do in some areas. Instead – as from later this year - we will collect rubbish and recycling from everyone twice a week. We will either collect your rubbish and recycling on Monday and Thursday, or we will collect it on Tuesday and Friday. There will no longer be rubbish collections from households on Wednesdays or Saturdays. We are not making any other changes. Our collection crews will still ‘pull up’ rubbish and recyclables from your storage area in the usual way.

We believe this new arrangement will get rid of any confusion about which days are your collection days. We hope that simplifying collections will help keep your streets as free from rubbish as possible. We ask residents who have storage areas in their properties always to put their rubbish and recyclables in those storage areas – not on the pavement. If you do not have a storage area, please put your rubbish and recyclables on the pavement before 7am on the morning of collection (not the night before), outside your own property.

We know that any change like this will cause residents uncertainty at first, and we will make sure our officers are on hand to give you help and advice. Our aim is to to help all residents to remember their collection days and to help keep their streets clean.

We know that rubbish dumping is irritating and upsetting to some residents, and it is a persistent problem in some streets. Unfortunately some people will keep dumping rubbish on the pavement at the wrong time, even after we have given them advice. We have to take enforcement action in these cases in order to protect residents who store their rubbish properly. We believe that nearly all residents support us in protecting the local environment in this way.

We are not making any changes to business waste collection. This is why you will still see collection lorries on our shopping streets on Wednesdays – they are picking up ‘trade waste’. We will continue to work with businesses to make sure they put their rubbish and recyclables out for collection neatly, and at the right time.

We will trial these changes across the borough over the next few months, starting in April. We may need to adjust certain collection rounds as a result of these trials. We then aim to finalise the routes in the summer, and publicise these changes again at that point. Please see this spreadsheet to find out if your street is affected by the trial [PDF] (file size 49Kb). Your collection days will change for only one week if they are affected.

We have paid careful attention to detail when planning these changes so that you do not experience any adverse impact. You can be assured that the Royal Borough, in conjunction with our contractor, SITA, will continue to strive to provide high quality waste collection services for you.

New materials recovery facility

We have some good news about the destination of our borough’s waste. The Princess Royal formally opened the new Materials Recovery Facility at Western Riverside on 10 March. This state of the art facility sorts your recyclables so they can be sent for processing into new products. In addition, we will soon stop land filling your non-recyclable rubbish. Instead we will send it to an Energy from Waste plant in Bexley. This will produce enough electricity to power 60,000 homes.