April 2024

Latest news

Check your collection day this week!

The long Easter weekend means your recycling and rubbish collections will be a day later this week. This includes collections on Saturday, 6 April for those usually with a Friday collection.

To help crews speed up collections, please present boxes, bags and bins by 7am on the day of collection, or the night before.

With waste collections a day later a higher volume of waste is likely. Squashing, crushing and flattening waste can help to reduce the number of trips that teams need to make to empty their trucks, as well as creating more space in your containers.

More time to recycle with summer opening hours

Recycling Sites have now reverted to their summer opening hours.

All sites will remain open from 9am to 4pm on weekends. Midweek, sites will be open from 9am to 6pm. Opening days vary from site to site, check online before you visit.

Reuse

Be a good egg and recycle your Easter packaging!

If you’re still making your way through your Easter treat, remember that almost all Easter egg packaging can be recycled in your weekly kerbside collection. Cardboard box – flatten and add to your black recycling box. Aluminium foil – scrunch and put into your bright blue bag. Plastic mould – into your bright blue Bag. Not yet recyclable at the kerbside or our recycling sites, are chocolate bar and sweet wrappers, plastic bags and plastic-foil pouches, plastic ‘windows’ in boxes, and similar thin-soft plastic film. Many of these plastics can be dropped off at supermarkets and some are taken in TerraCycle recycling schemes. Please check where you shop or have a look at the Council’s guide to supermarket and TerraCycle.

Attention former Mendip and South Somerset households – collection day changes coming soon!

Many households in the east of the county will be written to next month to explain that their collection day is changing in June. This is the second phase of a whole-county re-routing of recycling and rubbish collections. Working with our collections contractor, SUEZ, the reroute brings more efficient routes (no-longer limited by former district boundaries), reduced carbon emissions and miles travelled by crews. The reroute and all postal communications have come at no additional cost to Somerset Council.

Not every household will be affected, if you don’t get a letter then your day will stay the same.

 Residents may have:

• a change to collection day
• a change in week that their rubbish is collected (rubbish is still collected one in three weeks and recycling weekly)
• a one-off interim rubbish collection, if your rubbish collection week changes

There will be no changes to:

• collection days for garden waste subscribers
• clinical waste collections
• communal property collections with shared collections (such as blocks of flats, houses of multiple occupancy and retirement developments)
• schools waste collections

If your day is changing you’ll receive a letter in May. About three weeks later you will receive a service guide which includes a collection day calendar for the next 12 months.

If your days aren’t changing you’ll just receive the collection calendar.

Get it sorted!

Feed your family – not the bin!

Did you know that a staggering 21% of our general rubbish bin is food waste! When you recycle food, you help to protect the environment.

Our contractor, Biffa, processes food waste for us via anaerobic digestion – and it happens right here in Somerset.

Not sure what this means? We took a tour of the site near Bridgwater to reveal all! Grab your high-vis and join the tour by watching the following video:

YouTube video: How do we recycle food waste?

Last year we collected more the 23 tonnes of food waste - and it was all recycled in Somerset!

When you recycle food waste, rather than throw it out mixed in the rubbish, it gets turned into:

• Fertiliser, used by local farmers. Going on our crops to help produce more food!
• Bio-gas which is turned into electricity to power our homes

Catch Fixy on the road and donate your smart tech

The Fixy team will be back on the road over the coming weeks and months – the perfect opportunity to gather up any old or unwanted smart tech and join the team at an event.

Bring along your tech including laptops, tablets, mobile phones, digital cameras and other smart devices (see online for full list) – data will be securely wiped and refurbished by Donate IT before items are passed back into the community.  

• Fixy event and tech amnesty with Taunton Town Council at Taunton Independent Market Taunton TA1 1JQ. Sunday, 14 April 10am-3pm.
• Fixy tech amnesty with Glastonbury Town Council and Glastonbury Repair Café Town Hall, Magdalene St, Glastonbury BA6 9EL. Tuesday, 16 April 11am-2pm.
• Stoke St Gregory Envirofair 2024 Williams Hall, Stoke St Gregory TA3 6EU. Saturday, 1 June 10am-4pm.

With a boost from new funding, Fixy will also be working with local housing associations to hold ‘Tech Amnesties’, where residents can donate their smart tech for reuse or recycling.

Fixy promotes reuse, repair and recycling options to residents living in flats where the regular kerbside recycling collections do not include these items. This is a funded project so there is no cost to residents or housing associations, if you would like to get involved please email the Fixy team.

Spring cleaning? Don’t throw out, repair and reuse!

With the season of spring-cleaning upon us, remember the items you find in a clear-out could be given a second lease of life. The items we use every day are full of valuable materials. When we extend the life of the items we use it helps to protect the environment. Repair and reuse is one of the best ways to do this.  

Many people are learning and sharing skills to do simple repairs to save money and avoid throwing items away.

Repair events bring people together and offer practical help when commercial repair costs are prohibitive. Many small repairs are easy to do with a little know-how, lots of help can be found online, and plenty of people in your community have useful skills.