All blue bin collections in West Lothian will be suspended from tomorrow (Friday) for two weeks.
This means all households in West Lothian will miss one collection, with blue bin collections resuming from Friday, August 6.
Increased levels of Covid-19 in the community have led to a significant number of staff absences, in particular a number of staff being advised to self-isolate.
This means the council does not have the resources to collect all 300,000 planned bin collections for the next two weeks.
Suspending blue bin collections will allow resources to be used to prioritise brown and grey bin collections for hygiene reasons in the current warm weather, as well as empty outstanding collections to ensure households only miss out on one collection.
Please do not put your blue bin out for collection between Friday 23 July and Thursday 5 August. If your blue bin collection was due prior to Friday 23 July and is still outstanding, please leave it out until it is emptied.
All brown and grey bins should be put out as normal and left out until they are emptied. For updates on missed collections, please visit https://www.westlothian.gov.uk/bin-collection-updates
A West Lothian Council spokesperson said: “We regret that current staffing levels means we are unable to complete scheduled blue bins for the next two weeks.
“Under these challenging circumstances, we believe suspending blue bin collections for a full cycle of two weeks is the best and fairest option possible.
“Every effort has been made to maintain the service, including redeploying additional staff from other council teams to assist. Unfortunately, this will not be enough to allow us to clear the backlog of collections and maintain all scheduled bin collections in the short-term.
“We are aware of other councils and businesses having similar issues with staffing due to Covid-19, so we would ask West Lothian residents for their patience and understanding at the present time.
“In particular, we would encourage local people to continue the fantastic support they have shown to our dedicated collection teams throughout the pandemic, as they make every effort to maintain this vital service for us all.”
Residents are advised to compress the materials in their blue bin where possible to make additional space. Please consider if you are able to store clean recycling on your property until the next collection.
Excess recycling can be taken to any of our five community recycling centres. This should be bagged and placed in the general waste skip, with our contractor sorting through the materials offsite to extract anything that can be recycled.
Locations and opening hours for recycling centres can be found at https://www.westlothian.gov.uk/local-recycling-centres. Please book a slot in advance if you are bringing a van or a trailer.
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