Residents in villages in the south of Monmouthshire will have their refuse collected fortnightly from November, Monmouthshire County Council announced this week.
The south of the county from Rogiet through to Caldicot and Chepstow will have a fortnightly refuse collection service introduced over the next six months. This only refers to residual waste and all collections of recycling (red and purple bag) and food and garden waste will continue to take place every week.
Dave Harris, Monmouthshire County Council’s Head of Waste, said:
“All of us are recycling more and our residents have helped us to beat the 40% recycling target for 2009/10, which now stands at 41.3% for Monmouthshire.
“This means that we are creating less waste to go to landfill and we only need to collect rubbish that isn’t recyclable on a fortnightly basis.
“Nappies and incontinence pads will continue to be collected weekly so the refuse bags contain only dry items like plastic bags and packaging and bags won’t smell.
“We have to increase our recycling rate and reduce the amount of waste that we send to landfill.
“If we don’t continue to improve then the authority will be fined and so we are working hard with our residents to get recycling as much as possible.
“Our next recycling target is 52% by March 2013.
“The money we save on collecting waste can be diverted to our recycling collections which increase as people recycle more.
“We’ll make sure that everyone has everything they need to get used to the changes.
“Leaflets will be delivered to each household; we’ll have information on our website and there will be roadshows around the area for people to ask us any questions and find out more about recycling.”
This is the second phase of rolling out fortnightly waste collections to the whole county in the next two years.
This is the next stage in a scheme that the council aims to eventually get the whole county having refuse collections collected fortnightly.
Residents in Magor and Undy have had their refuse collected fortnightly since July and data collected so far has shown that this has increased the level of recycling in the area.
