Residents have been told they will now have two working days to report a missed bin uplift - or face waiting until the next scheduled collection.
The decision has been made by senior council officers in a bid to crack down on reports being made to the council several days or weeks after a collection date.
Gavin Hutton, the council’s head of Operations and Infrastructure, raised concerns that residents telling the council about missed bins weeks later could in fact be angling for a second collection.
“Within 48 hours we have 59 per cent of the bins being reported,” he told Wednesday’s Infrastructure, Land and Environment Policy Board.
“Of the 41 per cent left, five per cent of those were up to two weeks after.
“There aren’t missed bins, these are people taking secondary collections possibly.”
However, the remark irked Councillor Eddie Devine, who took it as an insinuation that constituents had lied about missed bins.
He responded: “It concerns me that a senior officer is accusing constituents of lying to get their bins picked up.”
“I didn’t hear the word ‘lying’,” board convener Councillor Cathy McEwan said.
Mr Hutton added: “I said that’s what could be happening.”
Councillor James MacLaren was fiercely critical of the two day deadline, as he urged administration councillors and officers to rethink their stance.
He said: “If you’re trying to cook an egg without breaking the shell - by saying you’re only going to accept reported missed bins within two days of collection - you’re wrong there.
“People can be waiting for ages. Two days can disappear quite quickly before they can get through to someone to record their bin has been missed.
“I don’t think that’s acceptable. You probably allows yourselves about seven days to pick these bins up so I would move that residents are given seven days.”
A vote was held in which nine councillors favoured the two day limit, while five backed a period of seven days.
Councillor McEwan and Councillor Jennifer Adam-McGregor both called for the deadline to be used with “discretion”.
“I would also hope that discretion would be used in this,” Councillor McEwan said. “If there’s a real good reason for missing this, I would expect that to be picked up.”
Missed bin information can currently make its way through three or four different channels, meaning visits to addresses are often needlessly duplicated.
As a result, the council will move all reports via customer service centre channels, either through the centre itself or the online reporting facility.
However, any specific elected member issues that are not resolved in this way can continue to be raised directly with the department.
