Covid19 has affected every aspect of our lives and provides extra challenges for every single activity, including some that we may take for granted like collecting our refuse.

The following is the end of day report for refuse collections that were made on Friday 31st July 2020.

Summary of today’s collections

Covid-19 factors

Operational staff absence due to Covid-19 remains just below 10%. We are currently collecting about 17% more black bin waste and 9% more green bin waste than the same time last year. Last week the brown bin waste was up to 80% more than usual for this time of the year. We are crewing up back-up wagons to help with this extra demand where possible, but this is becoming increasingly more difficult as we enter the summer holiday season and our crews need some well-earned time off. This may mean some missed brown bin collections, and although we will continue to do all we can to recover missed streets the next day, we cannot promise this will happen for all brown bins.

We are currently emptying approximately 85,000 black, green and brown bins a day on average.

Black/Green bins

The service commitment to residents for black and green bins is that every attempt possible will be made to complete the collections on the scheduled day. However, where that is not possible we will return to empty bins in missed streets within a further 48 hours (excluding Sundays). This does not apply to individual unemptied bins where normally we would not return to empty these bins unless we are sure the fault was ours

Brown bins

The amount of garden waste last week was up to 80% more than the average level for this time of the year. We will be prioritising the recovery of black and green bins, so the message to residents should be if the brown bins on a street aren’t collected we will do all we can to revisit the next day but we can’t guarantee we will recover brown bin misses at the moment.

So please leave it out for a day or so and then take it in if not collected. With lots more people still at home than normal, this is a great time for people to learn how to compost more – plenty of advice on what else can be done can be found at https://www.zerowasteleeds.org.uk/tag/garden-waste/ and special offers on food/garden waste compost bins at https://www.greatgreensystems.com/leeds-offer