Three-weekly bin collection plan rejected

A city council has voted to keep its fortnightly black bin collections rather than move to a three-weekly timetable.

At a meeting on Thursday night, Bristol City Council's councillors also approved plans to replace 8,000 black bins with sacks.

Committee members agreed to invest £13m to modernise recycling collection vehicles and to introduce a new fly-tipping round.

Councillor Martin Fodor, chair of the environment and sustainability policy committee, said the three-weekly collections had been suggested as a "possible solution" to increase the reliability of collections and street cleaning.

Recycling and food waste collections will remain on a weekly schedule.

The committee also approved an update to the city's contract with Bristol Waste, with council officers told to ask the company to improve the reliability of waste collections.

Thousands of properties without easy kerbside access - most of them in the city centre or along major roads - will have their black bins and dry recycling boxes replaced with black and orange sacks.

In addition, officers said they would look into new recycling containers.

The current fleet of recycling trucks will be replaced in five phases with vehicles of different shapes and sizes to help handle larger volumes of recycling.

"Taking steps to modernise our fleet of vehicles and phase out older more polluting diesel engines will bring about several benefits for our city," said Mr Fodor.

"These new vehicles will have resized compartments to be able to collect more cardboard and plastics, two types of material that we're seeing more of in household recycling. These larger capacities will mean fewer missed collections."

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