Biffa operatives make over forty thousand collections each week from properties in Melton Borough. They work as speedily as they can to minimise disruption in the areas where they are working. In the main we would like to thank other road users for their understanding when waiting behind our collection crews.

However we must also highlight the issue caused by drivers mounting kerbs and carrying out dangerous manoeuvres to try to get around our collection vehicles. This presents a real danger to our crew members and in other areas deaths have been caused by similar careless actions. We urge you to be patient when waiting to pass our vehicles and to respect the safety of our staff.

Just a quick reminder there won’t be any changes to your waste and recycling collections next week as the crews work  the bank holidays(with Christmas being the exception). For all the latest information on Rother’s waste and recycling collections check out Rother District Council’s Website

http://www.rother.gov.uk/article/4964/Rubbish-Recycling—Collections-over-the-Late-Spring-Bank-Holiday-%28May-30%29-will-continue-as-normal

With plenty of fine weather already, many of you will have been tidying up your gardens and filling up your brown bins. If in doubt, please check what you can put in your brown bin here.

Using the brown bins saves Melton residents thousands of trips to the recycling centres, but keeping the nutrients from your garden waste and kitchen scraps within your garden is good for your garden, good for the wider environment and saves you money.

Composting can be a challenge if it’s not done right, so you might be interested in the Rot-a-lot Composting Club, which offers free advice for new and experienced composters.

Compost bins are available from £8 through Leicestershire County Council (further details here), and several other more specialised compost bins are available (here), designed to need less effort or deal better with food waste.,

Another solid year for recycling, this year to April again saw more than half of all waste from Melton being composted or recycled rather than being sent to landfill.

This year we have made changes at certain mini recycling sites, introducing recycling bins for waste electricals and adding more bins for mixed plastic containers.

Meanwhile outside our houses, most of us are using the recycling boxes, but the amount of waste in our black bins is not being reduced.

A full half of all the waste in the black bins is food waste and can be composted by those of us with home composters (more info here). With the average household throwing away a third of its food before it’s eaten, a better option is to avoid throwing all this food away at all. During the summer, watch out for our campaign on reducing food waste, or visit the web site for Love Food Hate Waste.

To rectify the situation we will be collecting the flats recycling  wheelie bins  on the following schedule:

 Flats on recycling week two of the month will be collected: Papers on Thursday 7^th April, Plastic bottles/ tins on Friday 8^th April

 Flats on recycling week three of the month will be collected: Papers on Thursday 14^th April, Plastic bottles/ tins on Friday 15^th April

 Flats on recycling week four of the month will be collected: Papers on Thursday 21^st, Plastic bottles/ tins on Friday 22^nd April

If this has caused confussion please don’t hesitate to contact me on 01424 730344 and i’ll happily explain the above to you.

Happy recycling!!

On average, each person in the UK buys three new electrical items each year, whilst electrical waste is increasing by 5% each year. Two million computers are among the valuable materials that end up in UK landfill sites each year.

Recycling these products helps prevent pollution and saves precious resources by recycling the plastic and metal into new products. For example, a typical iron contains enough steel to make 13 food cans. As many of your electrical items as possible are refurbished and reused in preference to recycling them- a full 20% of the items collected.

In Melton Mowbray we now have three recycling banks for electricals- at Tescos on Thorpe Road, in the Wilton Road car park, and at the Valley Road shops.

We have several electricals recycling events planned.  These will be happening at Melton Mowbray Country Park Visitor Centre from 10:30 to 14:30 on Saturday 26th March and at Melton Mowbray Cattle Market from 08:30 to 12:30 on Sunday 27th March, so please also bring your waste electrical items along on those days. Large items should be taken to your local Household Waste Recycling Centre instead.

Recycling bank for waste electrical items at Tesco mini recycling centre

Monday 10th January see’s the arrival of carboard recycling in Rother as part of the kerbside recycling scheme. Any type of cardboard can be recycled from cereal packaging to bulky applicance packaging. The only thing we ask is for the cardboard to be clean (as we can’t accept cardboard with food residue on it) and for it to be flattended. Boxes can easily be flattened by breaking the seams.

Card needs to be presented in either your green garden waste wheelie bin, or the red recycling bag if you’re on the bagged recycling scheme.

Cardboard is one of the most environmentally effective materials to recycle since the fibre in the cardboard has already been processed. When cardboard breaks down in landfill it creates methane  gas, which is a major methane gas and harmful to the environment.  So this a great reason why we need to recycle all our cardboard in Rother. 

 The amount of domestic waste we recycle each month in Rother regularly exceeds 50%, this should hopefully continue to rise due to the introduction of cardboard recycling. This also means we are one of the best councils in the  country for recycling.

Providing we don’t experience adverse weather conditions, there will be no changes to domestic household refuse collection days; however, Garden Waste Collections will be suspended between 27th December and 10th January 2011.

Due to the garden waste collections being suspended, over Xmas we will be able to offer residents of Rother  an additional household waste collection when you would normally have had a garden waste collection. Recycling (boxes and bagged) collections will follow their normal schedule.

Details are also on the RDC website at http://www.rother.gov.uk/recycling – winter newsletter. In the event of adverse weather conditions during this period, on collection day please leave your bin at the collection point, until it is emptied

We hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The coming fortnight is as much a busy time the Verdant crews collecting your waste as for anyone, and our crews value the appreciation shown to them in various ways at this time of year.

Waste collection calendars for Christmas and all the way through 2011 are now available via the Council web site. For Christmas and New Year, collections will take place on on all weekdays including the Bank Holidays, so none of your collection days will change. However between the 27th December 2010 and 7th January 2011 all bin collections will be of black bins.

If you have more recycling than you can fit in your boxes, you can put any excess in untied carrier bags beside your boxes. Please remember though that bags should not be mixed, so they should either contain paper/card or glass or plastic bottles or food tins, drink cans, empty aerosols, clean foil.

We will stick to collection schedules as far as possible in the face of forecast bad weather, and if we are unable to collect your bins or boxes, it is best to leave them where they are normally collected from so that we can empty them as soon as possible. Latest news on any service disruptions will be covered on this page of the MBC web site.

Verdant staff in Melton wish you a very happy Christmas and New Year.

Monday 13th December 2010 – Refuse, recycling and garden waste collections for this week are on schedule to be collected.

Garden waste will be suspended for 2 weeks from Monday 27th December.

Recycling collections for some flats are currently delayed, and are being collected one week late. All flats will have their monthly collection completed by the end of December and normal recycling collections will resume for January.