Date issued: 20 May 2020
Collections of garden waste will restart on 25 May
- Special Collections for bulky items will restart on 1 June
- Temporary four-weekly collections of paper/card, cans, glass and plastics remain until 19 June
- Recycling and rubbish collections will return to normal on 22 June*
It’s recognised that households may have a lot of garden waste from the last few weeks and be keen to put out as much garden waste as possible. To help protect staff and ensure crews can get to every household in the borough, please only put out the usual allowance which is either one brown wheelie bin or four garden waste sacks. Overflowing, heavy bins/sacks or waste placed at the side of bins can’t be collected.
If you have any excess garden waste and can hold on to this, please do so and put it out in stages over your upcoming garden waste collection dates.
To make up for missed collections during the service suspension and to support those households with additional garden waste, the Council will be providing a temporary drop-off service for garden waste at several locations across the borough, starting 23 May. The details of this service will be made available online at www.colchester.gov.uk/gardendropoff before the weekend.
What you can do to help:
- Please share this information with your family, neighbours and friends in Colchester and check on your neighbours or family and offer to put rubbish and recycling collections out for anyone who is currently self-isolating
- Continue to reduce and reuse your garden waste through home composting and mulching. Visit Essex County Council’s top tips on the Love Essex website and buy a reduced price compost bin from www.getcomposting.com
- Hold on to and stagger putting excess garden waste out for collection. If you’re unable to store your waste safely, you can you can take it to Essex County Council’s Recycling Centre in Shrub End. Please expect long queues. More information on new site restrictions can be found at www.loveessex.org/newrules.
To ensure the service can continue to operate across the borough, when the garden waste collections restart, the temporary four-weekly collections of paper/card, cans, glass and plastics will remain in place until 22 June, when all the recycling collections, excluding textiles, will return to normal as fortnightly collections. This approach will support our staff who are already lifting and moving higher volumes than normal.
To help with this latest update, an updated temporary recycling calendar to reflect the next four weeks of temporary changes until the service returns to normal on 22 June, will be available later this week. To view and download this, use our postcode look-up tool at www.colchester.gov.uk/your-recycling-calendar .
Once the collections return to normal on 22 June, please use the 2020/21 recycling calendar which covers the period until March 2021 or visit www.colchester.gov.uk/recycling to check your collection information.
Residents on assisted collections and flats with communal rubbish and recycling collections, will continue to receive their normal service.
Councillor Martin Goss, Portfolio Holder for Waste, Environment and Transportation, said: “Thank you to everyone for their support with the temporary changes to our recycling and rubbish collections. A phenomenal amount of work has gone on behind the scenes to get our recycling collections back up and running and we’re now confident we have adequate measures in place to allow us to safely restart your full garden waste collection service.”
“These unprecedented times have been incredibly challenging for critical services such as the recycling and rubbish collections. Going forward we will be taking the lessons learnt from this situation and reviewing our service to ensure that we can deliver an even better service in the borough.”
Councillor Mark Cory, Leader of Colchester Borough Council, said: “We would like to say a huge thank you to all residents for their patience and understanding with the changes to collections during this difficult time. We know how tough this current situation is for everyone and I’m delighted that we’re now in a position to restart our garden waste collections in a safe and sustainable way, and I’m sure this news and timetable for restoring services will be welcomed by many.”
For further information and updates about Colchester Borough Council services during this outbreak, visit www.colchester.gov.uk/coronavirus
*excludes textiles
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Page last reviewed: 20 May 2020