COUNCIL RECONSIDERS COMMUNAL BIN COLLECTIONS
City of Edinburgh Council is poised to review communal bin collections and to trial new arrangements in a bid to improve the widely criticised uplift of landfill and recyclable waste.
The CEC response is (neatly) contained within a report which will go before the Transport and Environment Committee on Thursday.
If the report is accepted, rubbish collections will be trialled every other day (rather than twice a week). It is hoped that increasing the frequency will reduce overflow problems, and could mean fewer bins are needed. With fewer bins, maintenance and replacement costs would potentially be cut by up to 25%.
Meanwhile, over the next year, careful consideration will be given to the position of every one of the city’s 18,000 communal bins.
The plan is to try and group them in ‘more formalised’ convenient clusters – perhaps using ‘bin housings’ to make them look better and even introducing shared bin/cycle storage. Because of slow legal processes connected with Traffic Regulation Orders (TROs), the whole process could take until 2020 or 2022 to complete.
The use of side-loading bin lorries is also under review, and a trial in ‘a select area’ of Ward 12 (Leith Walk) will help officials to assess how many bins can be serviced per shift using existing resources. Performance indicators for the trial will be: missed bins, street cleansing requests, fly-tipping requests.
Not including January, there have been between 1,000 and 1,500 complaints about communal bins every month this year (pertaining to roughly 1% of 100,000 monthly collections).
This was ten times the number of s complaints made about collection of individual bins, but officials say not all problems are within the Council’s control.
These include trade waste abuse, double parking which blocks access, a huge increase in short-term lets, and a ‘highly transient population’ who don’t know or care about how to dispose of their rubbish properly.
Delivering on collection
In a press release today, Transport & Environment Convener Lesley Macinnes said:
‘By increasing the frequency of collections, we hope to vastly improve the service, reducing the occurrence of overflowing bins and associated litter, which I know is a frustrating and unsightly issue for residents and visitors alike.
‘Under our Waste and Cleansing Improvement Plan we made a commitment to provide an efficient, accessible waste collection service for the city’s residents. This project will go some way to achieving this, tightening up the way we make collections while providing greater opportunities to recycle waste, and I look forward to receiving the results of the trial.’
Spurtle welcomes the initiative, although, as non-experts, we worry that – even with increased frequency of collection – any reduction in the number of bins would result in more overflows.
Having had some contact with relevant officials over recent months, we acknowledge and applaud the efforts they’ve been making to improve the waste collection service. If only locals would make a corresponding effort to dispose of their rubbish thoughtfully, life would be a lot pleasanter and more hygienic for us all.
Follow this link to access the full Transport & Environment Committee report at Item 7.5.
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