Rother District Council

Last year, we collected a little under 36,000 tonnes of recycling and waste, and recycled just under 1/2 of that.

Compare that to 2004/5 when 36,000 tonnes of household waste was created in Rother. We recycled less than 1/6.

This turnaround is a wonderful achievement and a credit to you, the householder, and to our excellent collection teams. However, we are determined to increase the performance in the coming year, and with your help we can.

You will find below more information to help you help us push that percentage of recycled materials even higher, and to guide you in ensuring that you do not suffer any avoidable missed collections due to "contaminated bins" or your bins not being at "edge of curtilage". Find out what we mean by these below.

Contaminated bins (bins or boxes containing the wrong materials) can cause us and our contractor problems, which may not be immediately obvious. Our contractors transfer recycled waste to various centres around the South East, if the waste that they present has a certain percentage of 'contaminated items' in it, i.e., plastic in with paper or food scraps in your garden waste, they may refuse to take it, or even charge us to re-sort the materials. So we need your help to ensure that we attain as close to a 100% acceptance rate as possible.

A contaminated bin could mean that your bin is not collected. If you need to check, then find out what goes in your bin here.

Edge of Curtilage.

This can best be summarised as the agreed collection point, confirmed to you by the service provider (us).

• Please put your bins and boxes out by 7am on the day of collection.
• Please ensure you have the correct collection week (Recycling or General Waste)
• Please put your bins and boxes out at the approved collection point, normally the edge of your property nearest the collection vehicle's access road. (This is what we mean by edge of curtilage, see diagram below)
• We cannot collect bins and boxes if they are not in the right place at the right time, or if access is blocked.
• We do not take side or excess waste (waste not contained in the bin). An exception to this is for those households without a green garden waste bin, in which case you may leave up to two garden sacks out with each collection.

	A typical house curtilage

Missed Collections

If your bin has not been collected, then by all means let us know, but please bear in mind the following.

• On the day of collection, please ensure before you report it, that our collection team has indeed already been, for example, have your neighbours bins been collected? There may have been unforeseen circumstances which may delay a crew until later in the day, ie; road works. Please try to wait until 4.30pm before reporting if this may be the case.
• To guarantee a collection that week we will need to be informed of a missed collection by 5pm on the following day.
• Did you ensure that the bins were in the correct, accessible place, were not contaminated, and, a most frequent reason for missed collection; was it the correct bin?

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