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English councils could soon be providing free curbside garden waste collections

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  • Lizzie27Lizzie27 Posts: 12,494
    We pay £52 approx each for 2 bins, collected fortnightly. Bath & North East Council have been charging for years now, maybe as long ago as 10.
    North East Somerset - Clay soil over limestone
  • didywdidyw Posts: 3,573
    That's very true @Hostafan1.  Local councils have seen their govt. budgets cut, cut and cut again.  People blame the local council when they see a reduction in services but they should really blame the government.  We pay something like £46 a year for a fortnightly collection for our bin - which is where all the very woody clippings and weeds go. Everything else in the compost bin.  The local council used to collect food waste too, but that now has to go in the black general purpose bin.
    Gardening in East Suffolk on dry sandy soil.
  • KT53KT53 Posts: 9,016
    We pay about £40 per year, and I would rather pay than see the service removed or other services suffer.  Seems to be another case of Government 'solving' a problem which doesn't exist.
  • EustaceEustace Posts: 2,290
    We pay for a fortnightly collection of brown bin @ £57 per year. We never got any discount for the lockdown period when collection was suspended for a few months  :s
    Oxford. The City of Dreaming Spires.
    And then my heart with pleasure fills,
    And dances with the daffodils (roses). Taking a bit of liberty with Wordsworth :)

  • philippasmith2philippasmith2 Posts: 3,742
    I pay £57 pa for 1 Green Waste wheelie bin in West Somerset.  Collection is fortnightly.  No other waste collection is specifically charged for but the Council Tax is quite high at a few pence short of £2000 pa for 2 people.
    I don't know how long the Green waste has been a separate charge as I've only had need of it for the last couple of years.
    Unlike @Eustace we received a couple of months "free" whilst the lockdown precluded collections.
  • FireFire Posts: 19,096
    didyw said:
    The local council used to collect food waste too, but that now has to go in the black general purpose bin.

    It's a great shame that they stopped food waste collection. I hope they can bring it back online sometime soon.
  • GravelEaterGravelEater Posts: 124
    It's £58.50 per year as a single payment here, or £51 a year as a direct debit.  Bi-weekly collections, with the odd exception such as over Christmas weekend.  That's not a terribly large cost in the grand scheme of things, but I would have expected it to be more like a deposit for the bin itself and collections to be free.  The cost of collections should surely be made back when they sell the compost on?
    Perhaps there is some free compost to have from somewhere?

    I'd love to see a breakdown of how much compostable waste is collected and how much money this scheme either makes or costs to run.  Probably a FoI request which will tie up a lot of resources and probably funds too just in admin costs *roll eyes*.
  • AngelicantAngelicant Posts: 130
    We currently have free garden waste collections every two weeks, alternating with household waste, plus we have two recycling boxes and a food waste collection every week. Cheshire West are "consulting" on the subject and are likely to introduce a charge for green waste bins and a change to the new larger bin collections to 3 weekly, but of course this has cause a storm on Facebook by those whose household bins are full of dirty nappies and dog poo bags (been there, done that and not judging😃). I don't object to paying separately for garden waste but although we are in a village on the edge of a town and virtually every property puts a green bin out, I tend to think that many people will simply put theirs into the household waste bin if they have to pay extra for it.
    I wonder if this new initiative will put paid to the council's consultation.
    During lockdown last year a number of enterprising garden contractors with their own skips set up green bin collections that worked out substantially cheaper than the proposed council price. 
  • FireFire Posts: 19,096
    We have bi-weekly  general waste collection. Two weeks is indeed a long time for a bag of nappies to be sitting in full sun during the summer.
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