Rubbish could be picked up just once a fortnight after the rollout of weekly food waste collections.
Brighton and Hove City Council says since it increased the amount of plastic which can be recycled, the amount of general waste in bins is falling, and many bins are now only half full.
This is expected to fall further when food waste collections, which are currently being rolled out, are available across the city.
The cabinet will be asked to give the go ahead to officers to draw up plans for reducing doorstep collections two once every other week.
Deputy leader Tim Rowkins said: “We’ve made huge strides in modernising and improving the reliability of the service. Crucially, we are now seeing more and more waste moving from the refuse bin into recycling.
“As bins become emptier, we need to look at whether our current system is the most efficient and sustainable, and ask ourselves – can we justify collecting half-empty bins every week?
“Even prior to the major expansion of our recycling, we have been an outlier, with the vast majority of other councils having moved away from weekly collections some time ago.
“We know some residents will find the idea of this potential change difficult. I want to reassure them that for now, this is about exploring possibilities, not making any final decisions, and we’ll work closely with staff and residents every step of the way.
“I want to say a huge thank-you to our crews, who not only do an amazing job in all weathers but have also played a major role in transforming the service for our residents.”
Last week, a new system which allows people to check to see whether their rubbish has been collected or not on the council’s website was launched.
The council says it will soon report our collection performance weekly on the website too.
If the cabinet gives the go ahead, a report will go to the cabinet next spring or summer.
Weekly food waste collections will continue, and there will be no changes to recycling, communal bins or collections for flats.
Our bins haven’t been collected for 4 weeks now in a Small road in Portslade and they are all full. Perhaps they might like to come and collect that first, before changing the collection goal posts again. Sorry but the way things are CityClean or whatever they call themselves, couldn’t run a bath let alone a refuse service.
Yep – it’s not uncommon for people to get fortnightly or monthly collections as it is because of council service problems. Last I saw was that missed collections had actually gone UP.
Just sounds like a cost cutting measure than any genuine attempt at service improvements.
Maybe Ring the council then…
That’s one way to deal with truck breakdowns
Lots of councils collect recycling weekly. As the changes mean there will be more in the recycling bins then surely these should become weekly if general waste becomes fortnightly?
Maybe it’s time to cut out the middle man – aka Brighton and Hove City Council – and for residents to directly employ a waste collection company to collect our rubbish, docking this money from the council tax.
If service models are failing, or councils are prioritising vanity projects over providing statutory services, new service models are needed.
Sadly you cannot dock money from the Clowncil great idea but they need the money for their vanity projects they dint care about us the ones that elected them in.
Sadly you cannot dock money from the Clowncil great idea but they need the money for their vanity projects they dint care about us the ones that elected them in.
I think this is a poor idea, poorly timed, and should be refused on quite simple logic:
Academic research on waste service changes consistently finds that fortnightly collections only work when the baseline service is very reliable. Ours isn’t. Brighton doesn’t meet any of the conditions to consider it according to WRAP. Without the infrastructure and follow-through, you get overflow, pests, and more costly enforcement workload.
There’s a whole set of academic papers on urban waste compression stress – basically, if a household can’t store two weeks of rubbish neatly inside, they won’t. It instead, ends up on pavements. And then it becomes a public health issue. Brighton’s very structure is the worst possible form for this.
This comment is actually very sensible & backed up by data. Makes a change from the usual garbage on here. This city is full of HMO’s and many more are being approved by planners every week. Perhaps a planning condition could be implemented to combat any impact that requires developers including a bin store or private refuse collection? I would back any campaign that you may wish to organise on these matters.
When our community bins don’t get emptied I burn my rubbish. That said the service is normally pretty good.
Will they reduce our council tax for the reduced service?
Yes, some bins are only half full but many others are overflowing every week. The smaller bin sized, 140 l, is used for households between one and four people. Singles and couples could go every fortnight, but families especially those with a baby, or shared homes with three or four adults cannot. When you work out the maths that’ll be less than 20 l per person per week under half the UK average. That’s not enough, especially if collections aren’t reliable. And they’re not.
The only way this plan could work is with an investment of larger bins for families and shared homes and a way for households to upgrade. The smaller sized bins will not work for fortnightly collections above two people.
Time the council got around to rolling out com bins to the whole city and get rid of all the lazy bin men.
I agree with Nick. As a two person household we usually only put out one bag of rubbish a week. However the student house next door regularly runs out of room in their two bins each week.
BHCC couldn’t organise a p*ss up in a brewery! The so called voluntary food waste collection all of a sudden is looking mandatory!
What data? What academic papers lol, what is the name of this research paper?. Using Google isn’t actually research. Every other council in the country bar one or two, does not do weekly anymore because it’s not needed. If it is
And Benjamin being a serial nonsense talker sounds very much like Ron from the argus comments section.
Always happy to clarify sources, Dave.
Statista – https://www.statista.com/statistics/1329288/household-waste-collections-england/
Chartered Institute of Environmental Health – https://www.cieh.org/policy/waste/
For peer reviewed research, specifically food waste reducing the need for weekly regular collection, you might want to consider Williams, I.D. & Cole, C. (2013), Waste Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2013.12.012
Also in the DEFRA Resources and Waste Strategy, and the main one has to be WRAP https://www.wrap.ngo/- which shows why weekly food waste + fortnightly residual + dry recycling is the optimal system in cost, recycling rates, and carbon outcomes.
Whether collected weekly or fortnightly, there will still be the same amount of rubbish. Fortnightly means the lorries will fill twice as quickly and will have to empty at base twice as often and take virtually the same number of man hours as weekly collections. The only difference is how full or overflowing our bins get. I guarantee that whatever the ‘consultation’ (like those for residents’ parking), the result is a foregone conclusion.
Just get the current collections right – they are trumpeting the accuracy of the new ‘live’ collection info on their website and say that missed collections are automatically allocated for another unit. According to that our food collection has been taking place every week since 31/10 yet no one in our road has the bins and it takes 40+ days to order them. We get missed recycling regularly and NOT ONCE has it been rescheduled.
It’s a common assumption, but the logistics don’t work like that. The amount of residual rubbish isn’t fixed. When councils introduce weekly food waste and better recycling, the volume going into the black bin drops significantly, by about a third, according to research like WRAP.
On your second point, I don’t disagree. If the current service is patchy, residents have every right to be annoyed. Rolling out food waste collections with missing bins or no rescheduling undermines confidence. The evidence for fortnightly is solid, but the council still has to get the basics right for it to work in practice.