Residents frustrated by continuing problems with new recycling scheme

Richard Evans, local democracy reporter

A council has apologised to frustrated residents as they continue to report problems with the roll-out of a new recycling scheme.

Denbighshire County Council introduced its new Trolibocs system, which collects paper, plastic, metal, food cartons, and glass, earlier this month.

The council expects residents to separate the items themselves to help cut costs. A weighted hessian bag is used for cardboard.

But rubbish collections are now made every four weeks as opposed to the old two-week system.

Resident Stuart Davies of Fron Bache, Llangollen, a former county councillor and deputy leader of the authority, slammed the new scheme.

Struggling

Mr Davies claimed the new recycling vehicles are struggling to get up his narrow road on a hill, as opposed to the old system, which saw the residents of Fron Bache leave out their rubbish in sacks, negating the need for large wagons.

“They didn’t collect it all last week, and the clutch is stinking of a burning smell,” he said.

“Those vehicles won’t last a month. The service is costing twice as much now because they are sending a cage wagon for non-recycling and this one for the rest. It is two days now for Llangollen. The town is different days from us up the hills. It used to be done in one go.”

He added: “I predict that their recycling scheme which allegedly cost £10 million will fail because I suspect they are trying to resell sorted material at market prices. It never works. They aren’t clever enough.”

Mr Davies added: “And you can’t get through on the phones. The officers just put the general number on their emails, and they are all working from home.”

Teething problems

A Denbighshire County Council spokesman apologised on behalf of the authority, citing ‘teething problems’.

“We are still experiencing some teething problems with the roll-out of our new recycling service,” she said.

“Unfortunately, with any operational change of this scale, there will always be a number of unexpected issues at the outset. We remain confident that this will settle down over time, and that services will return to the level of reliability that we are used to in Denbighshire.

“We know that this provides no consolation for anyone who has had a missed collection recently, but we do expect this to be a short-term issue and to improve over the coming weeks. However, we would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused by any missed collections.

“We are encouraging people to use our online missed collections form, as that is the most effective and efficient way to communicate that information to our operational team

He added: “We would like to assure residents that we are taking these issues very seriously, and we are doing everything we can to get the new service running as smoothly as possible, as soon as possible.

“We would like to thank all residents for their patience while our crews adapt to the new service. We would also like to thank residents for their continued efforts with the new recycling system. It is already clear that the quality of recycling received from our collections has been very good, with very little contamination.

“We therefore remain confident that this new system will help us to improve our recycling rates and to reach the new statutory target to recycle 70% of household waste.”