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From the middle of February, your garden waste may be collected on a different day from your recycling and waste.
The routes are changing to make the service more efficient and sustainable and to help us collect from every customer on their scheduled day.
It will also help us tackle the climate emergency because the reorganised routes will mean our vehicles travel 11,000 less miles a year, saving about 21 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year.
All customers will be contacted by Friday 9 February with confirmation of their new collection day.
Collection dates in January will not change. Check your calendar for this month on our website.
The current garden waste service runs until Friday 29 March. We’ll contact all current customers by the middle of March to invite them to renew their subscription for 2024-25.
If you’ve provided an email address you will receive an email and others will receive a letter in the post.
If you aren't currently registered and would like to receive the service, online applications open from the middle of March.
Until then, garden waste can be taken to one of our recycling centres free of charge.
Please check opening times before travelling. You can also compost your garden waste at home.
Festive recycling results now in
After another busy Christmas season of recycling and waste collections, the figures reveal that:
- we collected 840 tonnes of recycling during the festive period. This is more than a 70 per cent increase compared to the amount we collect on a typical week
- our crews collected 657 tonnes of general (black bin) waste. This is 12 per cent more than the amount collected on an average week
- food waste recycling dropped by 8.5 per cent, suggesting that people may be wasting less food, or they might be choosing not to recycle, with food ending up in the black bin instead.
Recycling food waste is important. Food that’s recycled is turned into electricity, providing power from what would otherwise go to waste.
It can be tempting to buy too many goods, particularly during periods like Christmas, so we all need to be mindful of what we are buying and consuming. The purchase of goods and services is the largest contributor to a household’s carbon footprint in North Somerset. We also need to try and reduce waste where we can.
We want to thank our crews for all their hard work in keeping up with the increased volume of collections over Christmas and battling bad weather, making sure that residents weren’t disrupted and could enjoy the festive period.
Many residents have also taken advantage of North Somerset’s ‘tree-cycling’ scheme, to repurpose their real Christmas trees.
About £31,240 was raised for local charities, with nearly 2,000 real trees collected by volunteers from St Peter’s Hospice and Weston Hospicecare.
For garden waste customers, real Christmas trees can be recycled from the kerbside with your first garden waste collection of the year.
So if you haven’t had yours yet, make sure you put your tree out when it’s due, The tree must be no more than two metres and minus pot or decorations.
Check your collection days on our online collection calendar.
Alternatively, real trees can also be taken to one of our recycling centres, at Backwell, Portishead or Weston-super-Mare. Check opening times before you travel.
There is also still time to take your tree to Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm in Wraxall, where donated trees are either turned into chippings for use around the grounds or used for animal habitat enrichment.
Trees will be accepted until Sunday (21 January). Please leave your tree in the main car park during opening times (10.30am to 4pm).
Please continue to reduce, reuse and recycle as much as possible and help us improve this year.
Follow the team on Facebook and X for inspiration and ideas.
Also find out how you can help create a healthier, happier, greener North Somerset on our website.