Cross-party councillors have hailed efforts to make Bristol city centre a more pleasant place after a major drive succeeded in removing 450 commercial waste bins from the street. The council launched a project after the easing of lockdown to persuade restaurants, shops, bars and other businesses to keep bins on their own premises to stop “clutter” on pavements.
Scrutiny councillors heard how the authority’s neighbourhood enforcement bosses spent months trying to persuade reluctant firms to change their ways – some of whom “shouted and screamed” in protest. Those who still refused had their bins seized and taken to a yard, and their commercial waste contractors were charged fees to reclaim them.
Neighbourhood enforcement and street scene manager Kurt James told a council meeting that their efforts paid off, beginning with the Old City followed by two more phases – the rest of the city centre including Broadmead, Redcliffe and Temple areas, and Stapleton Road/Old Market. He told Bristol City Council communities scrutiny commission that officers were now looking at the best way to expand the scheme to the rest of Bristol, with Bedminster, Stokes Croft and Church Road expected to be next.
Mr James said: “We weren’t sure what would happen when we reopened from lockdown fully but we had an opportunity to do something different. We had to ensure we created a welcoming environment to welcome people back into the city centre and to use our shops, restaurants and bars.
“The opportunity we had was to create a new standard for waste presentation, working with businesses to encourage them to work more closely with their waste contractors to find ways of storing their waste on their premises, not on the highway. I remember eating in a restaurant on St Stephen’s Street where in order to go into the restaurant, you walked past a commercial waste bin with flies over the top, the smell of the bin, and you walked in, ate your food and walked out.
“That was our offer to people using our restaurants and bars. We wanted to create a more pleasant environment for visitors and people living in the city and to make our highways less cluttered.”
He said the first stage was to educate and engage with firms before moving to enforcement. “The next step is where we say ‘We are really serious about this and if you don’t do what we say you should, we will use our enforcement powers to compel you to act’,” Mr James said.
“The option is around seizing bins, charging the businesses’ waste contractors and issuing fixed penalty notices to those businesses who do not comply.” He told the meeting on Thursday, March 23, that the team identified 102 commercial waste bins in the Old City during phase one, and all were now removed from the street.
“We worked really closely with a number of businesses that have always stored their waste on the high street, that’s what they do,” Mr James said. “They were not interested in change, so we had to persevere, go back, keep saying we were really serious about this.
“The process was very difficult. Some businesses really didn’t want to play ball. “Some shouted and screamed and said ‘We’re not going to make the change happen’, so we persevered to the point where 102 commercial bins have been removed from the highway and it’s a much more pleasant environment.”
In the second phase covering the rest of the city centre, officers identified 346 commercial bins, obstructing pavements, belonging to 90 businesses that were serviced by more than 20 different waste contractors. He said 53 of the bins were seized and now none were stored permanently on the highway.
In the most recent phase, launched in December, the team had managed to reduce the number of bins on Stapleton Road from 113 to 71 as of two weeks ago but this was still too many so they made one last big push, seized nine bins last Wednesday morning and by the following day every single bin had gone from the street. “I couldn’t believe my eyes – we have been trying to do this for years,” Mr James said.
He said the areas felt less cluttered, there was less opportunity for fly-tipping, streets were easier to cleanse and people had a lot more space to move around.
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