COMHAIRLE CONTAE ÁTHA CLIATH THEAS
SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

MEETING OF SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

Monday, September 13, 2010

QUESTION NO.25

QUESTION: Councillor E. Tuffy

To ask the Manager if he will make an updated report on progress made towards providing households with Black/Brown collection on Bank Holidays, especially Mondays, and towards having Black/Bin collection rotas which provides a service which is relaible for all householders irrespective of the day of the week on which their Brown Black/Bins are collected?

REPLY:

A proposal for the restructuring of the refuse collection service in tandem with the introduction of the brown bin included a provision for collections to take place on the actual bank holiday itself was negotiated with the unions with talks concluding in May this year.    This negotiated proposal was however rejected following a ballot of refuse collection staff.   Following this there was intensive discussions with the Labour Relations Commissions which enabled the introduction of the brown bin.  Part of the agreement at that time with the LRC was that there would be further talks in early October which would encompass the presentation rates following the brown bin.  Therefore talks under the auspices of the Labour Relations Commission to resolve the issue of bank holiday refuse collections and other issues which are relevant to the overall customer base will take place.  The Council is indeed mindiful that the absence of such an agreement causes significant inconvenience to customers.

Saturday collections in lieu of bank holidays were discontinued because of low grey bin presentation rates combined with high costs of providing such collections.  The presentation rates for these collections were running at between 5% and 10% and the discontinuing of it was part of the strategy of keeping costs to the customer at a minimum.

It has previously been acknowledged that customers ordinarily collected on Mondays are affected more than others and refuse routes are being examined to explore available options to lessen this impact.  Additionally, it was agreed following discussions in the Labour Relations Commission after the ballot referred to above, that a full examination of refuse collection routes will be carried out in October using route optimisation software to determine what improvements can be made to the overall service having regard for the customer base, location and presentation rates and this will be based on collection data from June to September of this year.

It is worth noting that the presentation rates of brown bins on Monday routes are quite good considering the early stage of its introduction we are at and as a result this is reducing the issue in relation to the black bin collections.  In addition, refuse collection staff have collected all backlogs of waste including any side waste presented in black bin collections following the bank holiday over two days - Monday 16th August and Saturday 21st August.  A combined total of 9,904 bins were presented - giving a presentation rate of 50% and containing 384 tonnes of residual rate.  It should also be noted that on the Monday directly after the bank holiday a brown bin collection took place and there were 4,544 bins presented - a presentation of 30% and containing 105 tonnes of bio waste.