South Oxfordshire District Council (SODC) has announced that the temporary pause to the garden waste service is coming to an end with collections getting underway from 4th October.
The service was paused to ensure rubbish, recycling and food waste collections were not affected during the ongoing and well documented national shortage of HGV drivers. The driver shortage is still an issue for the council’s waste contractor, Biffa, but the council has agreed a new temporary arrangement for garden waste collections that requires fewer drivers, and means Biffa can resume the service sooner.
To make up for the disruption to the service the council will be extending customers’ current subscription to the service by three months – they will do this by delaying the collection of the customers’ next Direct Debit payments by three months.
The temporary arrangement means that fortnightly garden waste collections will change to take place every four weeks, but subscribers to the service will be able to leave twice as much garden waste out as normal. This temporary arrangement will be reviewed at the end of October to see if normal service can resume.
Customers will still get their brown bins emptied on the same day of the week as normal, but they will be emptied once every four weeks, instead of every two weeks.
The council is sending out more than 50,000 letters and emails this week to its garden waste customers explaining the situation in more detail, along with a copy of the temporary timetable.
More details on the SODC website.
