Is your council right to charge for garden waste collection?

In Wyre Forest, Worcestershire we have to pay for our green waste wheelie bin and collection once per fortnight, which in my own case is cost effective. I usually have more than a full bin and any extra is collected as well. The choice of using the facility is upto the houseowner, alternatively you take the waste to the tip in your car. The service offered is very friendly, the bin men helpful and the extra amount they will take is exceptional. This I suppose is what we are paying for.

Merton council ,Wimbledon..Labour majority is introducing an annual charge of 65 pounds to collect green waste!! 50 pounds if you are a pensioner or disabled..this is an outrage as many of us dont have cars to go to the one recycling point also most dont have green waste every fortnight so cannot see anyone signing up for this!!! we will be burnuing our green waste possibly

my council charge approx £50 a year for my brown bin which is collected ever fortnight this is good value and works out at £2 per collection, the alternative is to put it in black bags and take to tip a round trip of 10 miles. I am happy to pay for the service.

In Herefordshire, we have to buy disposable garden rubbish bags, costing about 50p if I remember rightly. I have been told that the contents go to landfill. I buy them for occasional use but I have a compost heap and put weeds and rose prunings etc into old compost bags and take them to the tip when I have a car load. I can combine it with a supermarket shop so don’t feel it’s too wasteful.(Everything else about our rubbish collection is great: normal rubbish in a black bag weekly, recycling in a wheelie bin fortnightly; the garden bags go with the latter)
Where my daughter lives in Reading, in an area of terraced houses, each house can have three wheelie bins outside. It has ruined the look of the area. Garden rubbish goes in either a green bin (costing £25) or a green bag (£10). The first bag she had was stolen but three bins was just too much in such a small front garden. The council is now considering an annual fee on top of the initial cost.
(Terraced houses where I live have clear plastic bags for recycling rather than an unsightly bin permanently parked outside.)
Why can’t councils compare notes and find the best solution? Reading took advice on introducing wheelie bins from daventry, which has since abandoned them, I believe.

We have lived in Sevenoaks for over 10 years and have always had to pay for green waste collections. It costs £12 for 25 heavy duty paper sacks or £42 per year for a wheelie bin permit. Collections are fortnightly. Seems fair to me as those with not much waste can buy the sacks and they don’t go off so they can potentially last for years. The waste is composted at high temperature and then sold back to us in bags; but I would never buy it as I know what’s gone into it!!! High temp or not, I don’t trust them not to give me back the bindweed and couch grass!

In Manchester, we have 4 wheelie-bins: for paper & cardboard; for placcy bottles, glass, & cans; for garden & food waste; and for non-recycleables. It’s all free. We may tiny the garden waste to fit in more, and lift the lid on a piece of 2×1″ to let the breeze dry the stuff so it doesn’t get soggy and so stick to the bin’s bottom. There’s special little bags for the food. Putting a half-brick on top deters seagulls, foxes and high winds. We may break the glass, too, so we fit more in; along with crushing the cans and heat-flattening the placcy bottles [hot water from the tap does it]. Most folks only put their bins out when full.
With councils being as they are, it might be cool to practice Community Recycling, by finding someone nearby with a council that takes garden rubbish for free, and u share yr garden rubbish with them. U’ll likely be able to return the service with something else. All the Best.

I have always had to pay the Council for collecting Garden Waste. Norwich was one of the ‘Pilot Scemes’ in this and I believe the charge at first was £30 per annum; this has now risen to £40. As my garden is nearly 1/4 of an acre I find the service very necessary although some of the waste still has to go to the :tip’ in certain seasons as the collection is Fortnightly. It is interesting to hear that in some places people have a free service of this kind. However as my charge only works out at less than £4 per month I and I am happy with it. I do not mind although of course Free would be batter!

Eileen Doyle

I’ve just discovered that my local council are planning an annual £25 charge for garden waste and are reducing the collections from fortnightly to monthly. Those that opt out will have their bin taken away.
This is such a shame as we recycle the vaste majority of all our waste – now all our raw vegetable waste, cardboard etc will go into the normal bin – doubling the amount we send to landfill or EfW sites. Just as we start to see the benefits of educating the nation on the importance of reducing waste and recycling we introduce punitive measures that will set us back several years.
I don’t agree with charging those with larger gardens more as this assumes those with bigger houses have more disposable cash and is a form of income tax. A simpler council tax system is cheaper to administer and can provide for everyones needs – which vary from one house to the next

We are charged £30 per annum to collect our green waste in Cirencester and have no problem with this charge. It saves numerous trips to the re-cycling centre throughout the year, which we had to do before the scheme was introduced a few years ago.

In Elmbridge I pay £35 per annum to have my brown garden waste bin emptied fortnightly . I also had to purchase the bin from the council. it is convenient, although, if I am away on the appropriate date or have masses of prunings, etc I still have to do one or two runs each year to the “tip”.

I am happy to say that this year I have signed up for the Portsmouth City Council’s brown bin collection. I’ve paid £30 for a year and they have lent me a huge, brown, wheelie bin which is emptied by the sub-contractor every 2 weeks. A very convenient and good service. It saves me loading my car up and driving some distance to dispose of this waste.

I am happy to pay for our garden waste to be collected. We have recycling, non-recyclables and food waste collected ‘free’ as part of what we pay in Council Tax.
We compost what we can, but there is quite a lot that needs to go in the garden waste bin. It used to be quite a palaver to take the bulky garden waste to the tip, which is a 22-mile round trip. The council used to provide a Saturday morning collection point in town, but so many people used it that the lorry was quite often full by the time I got there, or else there were loads of other people doing the same.
Our council (South Oxfordshire District) does have plans to offer the compost back to residents, I believe, but there is only a small scale pilot project at the moment. I’m surprised that you have only just got news that some people are paying. We have had this service for some years.