Sevenoaks bins from 6am, Monday 10 to Friday 14 August

Waste crews across the Sevenoaks district are starting their rounds at 6am every day this week, from Monday 10 August until Friday 14 August, because of the heat. Sevenoaks District Council is asking households to put bins out the night before, and says that if a bin is not out by 6am the crew will not come back that day. (Sevenoaks District Council, Early start for waste collections during the heatwave)

The change covers every kind of collection: “Please put your waste, recycling, garden and food waste bins out the night before your collection day, ready for our refuse crews to begin collections from 6am. This also includes bulky waste and clinical waste too.” Collection days themselves are unchanged, only the time crews arrive. (Sevenoaks District Council, Early start for waste collections during the heatwave)

The council’s reason is the same one it gave in June and July: “Excessively hot temperatures make working conditions tough for our crews, and an earlier start will give them more time to work in the cooler part of the day.”

The heat behind it

The UK Health Security Agency has a yellow heat health alert in force for South East England, along with London, the East of England, the East Midlands, the West Midlands, the South West and Yorkshire and the Humber. It runs from 9am on Saturday 8 August until 9pm on Tuesday 11 August. (UK Health Security Agency, Weather health alerts)

Yellow is the lowest of the three levels in the alerting system UKHSA runs with the Met Office. The Met Office describes a yellow alert as one where the vulnerable population is at risk and action is required within the health and social care sector, as against amber, where impacts are expected across the whole health service, and red, where there is a significant risk to life even for the healthy. (Met Office, Heat-Health Alert service)

What it means for you

Put your bins out on the kerbside the night before your normal collection day this week, not on the morning itself. That applies to rubbish, recycling, food waste, garden waste, any booked bulky item and clinical waste.

If your bin was still on your property at 6am and the crew has been, you have missed that round: the council says it cannot return the same day, and asks you to bring the bin back in and present it on your next collection day. That matters most for garden and food waste, where the next round is a fortnight or a week away rather than the following morning.

If a bin was out on time and still was not emptied, that is a missed collection, and the council takes reports through its report a missed refuse or garden waste collection page. You can check which day your street is collected, and what goes in which bin, on the council’s own find your waste collection day tool, and our guide to Sevenoaks bin collection days explains the cycle, the garden waste permit and what happens on bank holidays.

This is the fourth early start of the summer. Crews also began at 6am in late June, in the second week of July and at the end of July, so households on rounds that keep coinciding with hot spells have now had several weeks of night-before presentation. The separate recycling upgrade, which is replacing sacks with wheelie bins across the district, is running on its own timetable and is not affected by this week’s change.

Sources

• Sevenoaks District Council, Early start for waste collections during the heatwave
• Sevenoaks District Council, Find your waste collection day
• Sevenoaks District Council, Report a missed refuse or garden waste collection
• UK Health Security Agency, Weather health alerts
• Met Office, Heat-Health Alert service

Image: Cobden Road, Sevenoaks by Chris Whippet, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph.