Chaos over Christmas - the continuing problems of SBC's waste collections
A perfect storm of wind, missed collections and simply just too much cardboard
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Where the streets have no shame - the continuing problems of SBC’s waste collections
Swindon Borough Council’s radical changes to our waste and recycling collections hit a major snag over the Christmas period as the system was simply unable to cope. Rubbish blowing in the streets due to high winds, missed collections, mass confusion as to when the actual bin day was, and a larger amount of cardboard than they all anticipated all added to the mix. And now the council are being hit by a tsunami of complaints, with social media especially ablaze with torrents of people ranting against the new system.
By Jamie Hill
It was yesterday that the true problems of the chaos surrounding Swindon’s waste collections hit home.
I was driving through Swindon and I had never seen anything like it since that time I lived in France during a month-long bin workers strike.
There was rubbish everywhere. Blowing in the streets. Black bins empty of their contents, which had probably ended up in someone’s front garden, were in the middle of the roads. Blue bags, meant to be weighted to protect them from the weather, were doing an American Beauty type dance before me. And rubbish was everywhere.
It was like one of those dystopian movie scenes where society is breaking down in front of you.
Before then I thought it had just been my street that had been affected by not having any collections for more than two weeks.
But this perfect storm of missed collections and high winds had affected huge expanses of the town.
And all of this on the back of Swindon Borough Council introducing the most radical changes to our bin collections in 15 years. Something that as a town we were all still collectively trying to get our heads around.
No wonder that the populace were none too happy.