Stockton Council apology as 6,000 miss new recycling collections

A leading councillor has said they are overcoming “teething problems”, while a local MP has criticised the system as “chaos” after thousands of residents did not have their recycling collected yesterday (Tuesday). Waste crews will have to work on Saturday to catch up.

It marked the start of a new system where food waste now goes into caddies, while plastics, tins, cartons go into blue bags, cardboard and paper into white bags and glass and batteries into a blue box, all collected weekly. General waste from traditional bins and garden waste are now collected fortnightly.

Stockton Council put out a statement yesterday afternoon saying: “We are aware that some residents have not had their recycling collected today (March 31) as planned.

“Crews have been working to get through as many properties as they can but have now had to stop due to drivers working the maximum hours they are legally permitted.

“The delays to collections has been caused by issues with unloading the wagons and we are very sorry for the inconvenience.

“If your recycling was due to be collected today and has not been collected, crews will be doing a catch-up collection on Saturday (April 4).

“Collections will continue as normal tomorrow, Thursday and Friday as the issues with unloading the wagons have now been resolved. Once again we are very sorry for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience.”

Stockton West Conservative MP Matt Vickers said he had heard reports of several vehicles “out of action on the very first day” and residents saying their carefully separated waste was being mixed together in collection wagons.

He has written to Mike Greene, the chief executive of the Labour-led council, to find out what the council would do to remedy the situation, and has launched a survey to gather views on the new system.

Mr Vickers said: “Labour’s new waste and recycling scheme is utter chaos. There have been numerous reports of residents doing the right thing – taking the time to sort their waste – only to see it all mixed up and thrown into the same wagon. That makes a sham of the entire process.

Matt Vickers, Conservative MP for Stockton West. Picture: Matt Vickers MP.

“This isn’t the fault of our hardworking bin men. They are doing a tough job. It is the result of a ridiculous new scheme introduced by Stockton Labour.

“Expecting people to juggle six different bins while scrapping weekly collections is complete madness.

“Having warned about the consequences when the council proposed this I have written to the chief executive of the council to think again about their approach. It simply isn’t working for local residents or the bin men who work hard day in, day out.”

The food waste collection was brought in nationally by law. The swap to weekly recycling and fortnightly non-recycled waste collections was decided by the council following the unanimous recommendation of a cross-party committee, including Conservative members, to improve the town’s recycling rate, which had been the lowest on Teesside and one of the lowest nationally.

Cllr Nigel Cooke, cabinet member for environment, leisure and culture, repeated the apology to residents who did not get their recycling collected.

But he said he believed residents were supportive of the “momentous change” which affected everyone.

He said: “We’ll be going back to those houses on Saturday morning. If we’d started off today there’d have been a knock-on effect.

“With a massive change like this, we always expected some teething problems. This has been the biggest change that I’ve been associated with during my time on the council since 2011.”

He said the “magnificent” Care For Your Area team had worked hard to prepare for the changes and get used to new vehicles and systems, adding: “We did everything we could proactively to try and get things in place, but there was inevitably going to be a few bumps in the road. You can’t expect things to work perfectly on day one.

“There was a lot of learning yesterday. I’m confident we’ll get this to where we need it to be within the next few days.

“Some of the things weren’t working as we expected them to. There was a lot of thinking on the ground. Until you actually go live you don’t know what you’re up against.

“There was an increased demand. There was a lot of recycling to collect. They’ve had the new bags for a couple of weeks, they’ve probably stored quite a lot of material. That’ll settle down.

He encouraged people who did not have blue boxes or bags to contact the council. “We’ll be making sure they get everything.”

In response to Mr Vickers’ criticisms, he said: “We are enacting changes brought about by the last Conservative government. We actually support them, I believe in recycling.”

He said they had seen a “massive uptake” in people wanting to recycle in the last few days, with “massive queues” to get white bags and blue boxes: “Those receptacles will be available at libraries. They’re flying out of the door as soon as they come in.

“This tells me that people are engaging, they want to recycle and it’s just going to take a few days for people to get used to these changes.”

Asked about reports of separated types of recycling being mixed and put into the same wagon, he said: “We did order a fleet of new vehicles. We’re still waiting for some of those vehicles to come.

“So there were many of the vehicles out on the road yesterday. There were a few technical faults which were overcome very quickly.

“We also had to supplement this with other vehicles including flat back wagons. At the end of the day, that recycling will be presented to the recycling company as it should be.

“We’ve been pulling out the stops to make sure everything was collected. Clearly there were those few hiccups. I’m reliably informed that not one green bin was missed.”

He denied Mr Vickers’ assertions that bin men were “forced to work late into the night to complete their rounds”, saying they worked as long as they legally could.

He added: “They can’t drive beyond a certain amount of time. The health and safety of all of our staff is paramount.

“We called operations to a halt yesterday because we didn’t want drivers to exceed those legal limits, and that was the right decision. They worked hard all day yesterday.”