Thousand of Preston households have bun collection days changed

Around 3,500 Preston households are to have their bin collection days changed – some for the second time in six months.

Preston City Council says the move is intended to resolve the remaining problems that resulted from a major overhaul of its waste service back in April.

Approximately 1 in 20 properties in the city – across more than 130 streets – will be affected by the latest changes, which will come into effect from Monday 19th October. Householders will be contacted directly and provided with updated collection calendars if their address is amongst those set for a switch.

The refuse system was beset with issues after the revamp that took place in the spring – the biggest in 14 years – which coincided with the introduction of new weekly food waste collections, as ordered by the government.

A significant minority of dwellings in the city were caught up in a chaotic period which saw bins on some roads repeatedly left unemptied when they were due to have been collected. As the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) revealed at the time, one street in Ashton went without its overflowing recycling being removed for five weeks.

The authority blamed the problems on a delay in the delivery of the specialist vehicles it had ordered to deal with the food waste that it was now obliged to collect separately.

However, tweaks to the schedule itself have now also proved necessary – and the LDRS can reveal that, for a small number of residents, the new arrangements will leave them with at least one of their bins being picked up on a different day within the collection cycle to the others.

For those households, that unpicks one of the benefits of the redesign implemented earlier this year.

The original idea was that every address should have each of its bins emptied on the same day during the usual fortnightly collection period – alternating between general rubbish one week and recycling the next, with the new food waste caddies being collected weekly on the corresponding day. Previously, some properties had different bins picked up on different days of the week.

However, using the city council’s online bin collection checker, the LDRS has found several examples of streets affected by the changes starting later this month that will see their collections staggered once again.

In most of the instances identified, that means food waste pick-ups remain on the same day as they are at the moment – while general, recycling and garden waste collections shift to a different one in the cycle.

A very small number of households will also have a different garden waste collection day – if they pay to opt-in to that service – to their general rubbish or recycling.

In addition to factoring in the new food waste rounds, the original changes were intended to improve the efficiency of the refuse collection service in the face of a significant growth in the number of households in Preston over the past decade. The vast majority of addresses saw a switch in one of their collection days as part of the April overhaul.

Explaining the rationale for the forthcoming collection amendments, Cllr Zafar Coupland, the city council’s cabinet member for health, wellbeing and neighbourhood services, said: “The changes introduced earlier this year were among the biggest updates to our waste and recycling service in over a decade – and they have worked well across many areas of Preston.

“However, we acknowledge that there have been some recurring problems for some residents and we apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

“These changes are to address those problems. A small number of households will see changes to their collection arrangements. These changes will streamline the service and support reliable collections for residents.

“We have also continued to improve recycling services across the city. Our battery recycling scheme has already received a positive response from residents, and people can now recycle juice, milk and soup cartons in their yellow-lidded bins, making it easier to recycle more at home.”