Garden waste collections will be back up and running on Monday 24 August.
To make up for the lack of collections in recent months we will now be extending the season until November.
However, instead of fortnightly, we will be running a four-weekly service for the remainder of the year. This means we expect each household to have three or four collections before the year is out.
Collections were suspended in April so that we could prioritise green and brown bin collections throughout the worst of the pandemic. As a result there has been little disruption to the main collections throughout lockdown.
Why have you made this decision?
Last year, we started to make new plans for garden waste collections in 2020 because the fluctuations in demand sometimes meant we couldn’t always complete the scheduled routes.
To address this, we started to review the routes, invested in in-cab and introduced a registration scheme which has had over 38,000 households sign up.
We did this to improve efficiency by building data on who was using the service and how often, allowing us to only visit streets where we knew there would be garden waste.
Then along came COVID-19 which scuppered our plans and brought many challenges, including restrictions on how we can work, increased waste from households and the need to safeguard some of our vulnerable staff.
Although most of these staff are now back and we have lots of measures in place, we still only have a finite number of drivers, a lot of whom have been working non-stop, without a break since March.
Our priority is always the statutory brown and green bin collections and our planning for re-starting garden waste is about making sure we can still maintain those collections as far as possible despite what COVID-19 might throw at us going forward.
We hope that a four-weekly garden waste service will give us that bit of flexibility we need to be confident we can run all three kerbside collection services alongside each other.
Can't you just hire more staff?
We have - we've hired 14 more staff to act as loaders. The key challenge is sourcing experienced refuse truck drivers; they are harder to come by.
We prefer that our drivers have experience of driving refuse vehicles because it is not just about size. They need to be skilled to manoeuvre rear-steer, 26 tonne vehicles in some of our confined urban spaces, from the back alleys of Keyham to the narrow streets of Tamerton Foliot.
When will my first collection be?
The Check my collection day website has been updated: www.plymouth.gov.uk/binsrecyclingandwaste/checkyourcollectionday. Simply log on, pop in your postcode and the date of your first collection will come up. Please make sure you check as your collection day as it may be different than last year.
The usual guidelines on presenting up to four bags still applies and you can find out what can and cannot go in your bags here: www.plymouth.gov.uk/gardenwaste
You will also start to see some crews out and about from this Monday as they undertake their inductions and get trained on the new in-cab technology. Don’t worry if you don’t see us, as we don’t officially start the service until 24 August.
Anything else?
Yes. We’re sorry we haven’t been able to start up before now and that residents were expecting fortnightly collections.
This year has been difficult and going forward, we will be making a number of further improvements to make the service better for residents.
If you’ve not yet registered for garden waste collection, you can do so here: www.plymouth.gov.uk/gardenwaste
UPDATE 11/8
Few of things to clear up following feedback from residents...
We're not running 'early collections,' but there are crews doing training routes this week in readiness for the service re-starting on 24 August.
We always do this ahead of the season starting and this year it's key because of the new in-cab tech. This training usually takes place each year unnoticed, but because of the eager anticipation of the service re-starting (and many people still at home), eagle-eyed residents have spotted the crews out and about on their training.
To be clear – the service doesn’t start until 24 August.
Why is my collection day showing as this week?
We're sorry, this is a software glitch. Long story short, the back end of the system shows the training crews the routes. But for some reason, it's showing on the front end, too. We've tried to turn it off but can't do this without disabling the tool altogether. We're trying to find a fix for this but in the meantime, be assured that service doesn't begin until Monday 24 August.