Refuse Bin Collections – What is happening?

Sevenoaks District Council must change its methods of collecting refuse across the District.  The Government requires the Council to separate food waste from other waste after April this year and is asking for an improvement in the amount of recycling that is collected.  The Council has also been ordered by the Health and Safety Executive to stop the manual handling of rubbish sacks.

This means that all residents will be supplied with new food waste caddies which will be emptied every week.  Sevenoaks Council will also be changing, like all other councils in Kent have already done, to alternate weekly collections of recycling and residual waste.  The Council proposes that most residents should use different wheelie bins for each of those.  That will allow all the bins to be emptied mechanically into the trucks.

The Council’s favoured solution is for each house to have its own set of wheelie bins which must be taken by householders to a suitable place near the road on collection day before returning them onto the householders’ premises.  The Village Association is concerned that because many houses do not have a road frontage, this will be difficult for some people.  It could also lead to people keeping their bins permanently on public amenity land within neighbourhoods, such as front gardens or in alleys behind gardens, which residents do not own.  The Village Association has always opposed any such abuse of its land and these new arrangements are potentially going to make this much worse.  The Council requires level access between the bins and the refuse freighter.  In many neighbourhoods, a lot of the places where people currently leave rubbish sacks on collection days are unsuitable for wheelie bins because of soft or uneven ground, or because they would cause an obstruction so significant alterations to landscaped areas may be necessary.

The Council has suggested these issues mean it would be preferable for neighbourhoods to build permanent storage areas for large communal bins.  However, finding suitable sites close to roads for access by refuse freighters, and convenient for residents to use, will not be practical.

The Council has said that the Village Association and Residents’ Societies must bear the cost of any work to facilitate bin emptying.  This would be completely unaffordable.  There are also particular challenges at apartments which already have communal bin stores that cannot be adapted easily.

Since last June, the Village Association, with support from the Parish Council, has been trying to negotiate with Sevenoaks Council to find a solution to these difficulties that will not unduly inconvenience residents, and which will not lead to a big increase in Village Association and Residents’ Society fees, whilst still meeting the Council’s objectives.  The Council’s officers have not yet been able to offer any acceptable alternatives.

The issue is becoming urgent as time progresses, so it has now been raised at the highest level in the Council, and we are also seeking support from our Member of Parliament, Tom Tugendhat, although he does not have direct responsibility for waste collection by the Council.

We will continue to update residents when we have more news and, once we there are viable options, we will be consulting with all Residents’ Societies and, in turn, their residents as this would be an important change.