More than 100 complaints have been received about Perth and Kinross Council’s decision to limit garden and food waste collections over the summer.
Anger has continued to build throughout the area’s environmentally friendly residents whose extra brown-lidded bins are not being collected this summer.
The council has reached capacity in its ability to deal with the garden rubbish and food scraps after rolling out a recycling scheme to scale back the amount going to landfill.
It means only one brown-lidded bin per household will be uplifted, leaving many people with additional bins full of rotting rubbish and 120 residents calling the council to complain.
Professor Rex Last, from Alyth, said, “We pay exorbitant amounts of council tax for, amongst other things, a refuse collection system that is unfit for purpose.
“My neighbour and I fill two bins per fortnight in the summer and get one bin emptied at a time of maximum need for the service if we are lucky.
“We can use the unemptied bins to store waste but they won’t be emptied. How can I continue to store an extra bin’s worth of waste per fortnight in a single bin until such time as the council think of a solution or the summer runs out?
“The most serious issue of all is health and safety. A fortnight is a long enough time in bin emptying and now it may be weeks until one of them is emptied, by which time its contents will present a serious health hazard.
“No wonder the English language also turns “refuse” into a verb which has a pretty obvious connotation in this context!”
St Fillans residents have also complained to The Courier that their collections have been limited.
One woman from the Rosemount area of Blairgowrie, who did not want to be named, said, “The smell will be awful and flies are already gathering. It’s a health hazard.
“We are all pensioners in this house and there is no way we can get a bin full of grass clipping and food scraps to the dump. How will we even get them out of the bin?”
The council acknowledged people had been caught out by the changes but said full notices had been placed in local media and its own website.
The cost of sending letters to each of the area’s 55,000 households would incur “significant costs” which had been criticised in similar past occasions.
Long-term proposals for collections will be firmed up at the end of November.
Image used under Creative Commons licence courtesy of Flickr user dogbomb.