West Lothian Council has assured householders that “lessons will be learned” after bin uplifts over the Christmas holidays were hit with a perfect storm of bad weather, staff shortages and increased waste tonnage.
Head of Operational Services Jim Jack took the unusual step of addressing the Linlithgow Local Area Committee after a service breakdown during the Christmas holidays left 15,000 bins, mainly in the ward area not collected for two weeks.
And he promised new action plans were being drawn up to ensure there would be no problems in the upcoming bank holidays over Easter and for the King’s coronation in early May.
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In a report to the committee Mr Jack, the officer in charge of waste management, said that customers had been advised ahead of the Christmas holidays that there would be no brown bin uplifts between 25 December and 4 January. Brown bins are for garden and food waste.
Collections of grey bins for non recyclable and blue and green for recyclables were scheduled for uplift on the Wednesday to take account of bank holidays.
Mr Jack added: “The council was unable to provide full service collection between 28 and 30 December 2022 due to a number of issues.
“The disruption occurred over two days affecting eight routes on each day, and was therefore localised in its impact. It is estimated that 15,700 bins (16%) of the 100,000 bins scheduled for collection that week were not collected.”
The disruption was fixed by the first week of January or else it would have stretched the calendar of missed up lifts to a month.
Five major issues have been identified behind the failings. Staff sickness, vehicles, increased tonnage of waste, problems with waste transfer and poor communications.
Mr Jack’s report outlined solutions being looked at including “building capacity” onto the plans for forthcoming bank holidays to ensure enough staff cover and allowances made for extra vehicles.
Problems with staff sickness were exacerbated during Christmas week because other staff from areas such as roads could not be rostered on to help with waste management as they were tied up tackling effects of the severe weather. The weather also added to problems with vehicles.
Talking to councillors at the latest local area committee Mr Jack added: “ It’s very unusual for the service to have this level of disruption. And I would like to assure the local area committee and customers that the matter has been taken very seriously and that lessons will be learned.”
He added: “ We do recognise that our communications to customer should have been clearer and more timely. Failings in this area in particular added significantly to customer frustration during the festive period.”
Councillor Tom Conn asked if grey bin material went straight to landfill and was told that it did not, being subject to a final check by the waste station at Leavenseat for recyclables before going to energy from waste, which is burning rather than into landfill.
Mr Jack added: "West Lothian has one of the lowest landfill rates in Scotland."
Chairing the meeting, councillor Sally Pattle suggested that social media was not the best place to prioritise public communications as many did not use it especially during holiday periods. “It’s very easy to say that we tweeted information, but that’s no use to man nor beast.”
Mr Jack said he would encourage people to sign up to the bin alert system used to push information as well, by text messaging customers.
Councillor Pattle acknowledged that Mr Jack’s appearance at the committee was not a normal part of the committee’s work but added that a lot of people in the town had serious issues with bins not being collected over the Christmas holidays.
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