Missed recycling collections drop by 75% but 64 households still being missed every day

The number of households reporting missed recycling collections has dropped 75 percent since the peak, but 64 a day are still not receiving a service.

Following a period of intense activity by South Hams District Council and the introduction of some temporary service changes, the number of Super Recycling collections being missed by the council’s waste and recycling contractors FCC Environmental has "dramatically reduced".

In the last few months, many residents in South Hams have experienced significant disruption to their recycling service, as the contractors tried to roll-out a new kerbside recycling service.

At the peak of the disruption in mid-May, the council was receiving about 255 reports of collections been missed every day. By the end of last week, that number had dropped to about 64 missed collection reports per day. At the same time, the number of people phoning the contact centre had also reduced by approximately 36 per cent.

Councillor Keith Baldry, Executive Member for Recycling and Waste, said: “Whilst it is clear from these statistics that there has been an improvement in performance, I think that there are still an unacceptable number of collections being missed.

“Our focus in the last few weeks has been to get everybody a collection on the day that they are meant to have a collection, although it was not the recycling service that we had promised.

“I am pleased the situation has improved but there is still more work to be done.

“The Executive has been very robust with FCC throughout this disruption. They have now requested that FCC continue to deliver more significant and sustained improvements to reduce the number of missed collections further before we consider reinstating the full Devon Aligned kerbside collection service to all residents.”

South Hams District Council will continue to monitor the daily performance of the service. The Executive continue to express to FCC that they must focus on the complex and repeat missed collection issues, as well as key priorities such as those households who need assisted collections.

FCC have committed to producing the next steps of their action plan on Monday, 12 July.

This will detail a plan for the systematic review of the existing rounds and a detailed plan to roll-out the Devon Aligned Kerbside Recycling Collection Service to all of the residents in the South Hams.

These plans and any progress on them will be reviewed by Officers and the Lead Member and reported back to council as soon as possible.