Dear Resident,
The coldest winter weather in around a decade severely impacted recycling and waste collections throughout the week and in light of this, I wanted to contact you and outline what we are doing about this. Whilst an around- the-clock gritting operation largely successfully kept priority routes clear of ice and snow, the icy pavements in particular posed a significant issue and prevented recycling and waste collections taking place and a revised collection programme is in place for next week only. We had originally hoped that work would be ‘caught up’ but as approximately 80,000 recycling or waste collections are made each day, as the impact of the severe weather continued, it became apparent this was not going to be feasible.
All residents with scheduled collection days of Monday through to Thursday will receive a food waste collection and a non-recyclable refuse collection only, with recycling and paper collections resuming as usual from the following week. In recognition that residents in the earlier part of the week did not receive a collection, we are undertaking that all residents next week will receive a food waste collection and a non-recyclable refuse collection, with residents being asked to store recycling and paper collections for their next scheduled collections as per their usual pattern. Whilst this is not ideal, we only have a finite number of vehicles and collection staff and all will be engaged with this work, hence asking residents to store their recycling.
Full details about these temporary changes are published on the Council’s website www.bromley.gov.uk/wastenews if you want to refer to them, but I wanted to draw this to your attention and thank you for your anticipated support and understanding.
The problems we faced earlier in the week have only been faced once or twice in the last decade, with particularly low ongoing daytime temperatures and consequently icy pavement surfaces. This had a severe impact as ice poses difficulties from a manual handling perspective as we are not just asking collection crews to walk on the ice but lift heavy containers and twist etc. The safety of residents and our collection crews is of upmost importance and, therefore, we ceased our collection service until the conditions were safe to deliver services.
You can read more about our around-the-clock gritting operations on our website, which both includes gritting roads and pavements in high footfall locations and I want to thank the staff involved in this. I particularly want to thank our Snow Friend volunteer residents who cleared snow away or spread grit from supplies we provided in their residential street as you did make a difference for all of us. Thank you, too, to everyone who has checked up on more vulnerable neighbours from a social distance, of course, and thank you for your support at this time.
Kind regards,
Councillor William Huntington-Thresher
Executive Councillor for Environment & Community Services
