Newport City Council has announced that its new three-weekly bin collection schedule will start being rolled out to households across the city from Monday 16 October.

The new schedule will see household rubbish bins and garden waste bins be collected once every three weeks. Currently these are collected once every two weeks.

Residents will shortly receive the following information through the post:

a letter informing them that the changes are about to start
a leaflet explaining what the changes mean and why they are being introduced

All households will continue to have their waste and recycling collected on the day of the week which it currently is. For example, if your collections are currently on a Monday, they will remain so.

All garden waste bins will continue to be collected fortnightly up until the end of November 2023, which is when these collections pause for the winter. They will move over to three-weekly once they resume in late February 2024. Note that garden waste collections for phase one households will remain three-weekly, as these have already moved onto the new schedule.

All other waste services will remain unchanged. This means that recycling and food waste will continue to be collected weekly, and hygiene bags will be collected fortnightly.

Residents living in flats or a house of multiple occupation will not have these changes made straight away. The council will work with landlords to introduce these changes at a later date.

The change has been brought in to help the council meet its recycling targets. Currently the council is recycling around 67 per cent of waste it collects. To meet Welsh government targets, this needs to increase to 70 per cent by 2024/25.

Failure to meet this target will see the council liable for fines. At the current recycling rate, the fine from April 2025 would be in excess of £500,000 per year.

Analysis of waste collected in Newport shows that almost 40 per cent of what is currently going into household rubbish bins can be recycled at the kerbside.

Councillor Yvonne Forsey, cabinet member for climate change and biodiversity, said: “It is important that we do everything we can to increase our recycling rate, which is why we have introduced these changes.

“The first phase of our rollout has gone well. We haven’t seen a lot of issues with the changes, with a compliance rate of over 99 per cent.

“We have also seen around a 15 per cent decrease in the amount of residual waste collected from these properties. If this is replicated across Newport, we will meet our 70 per cent target rate.

“I’d like to thank those households who were part of phase one for helping us make the transition a smooth one, and thank all of our residents for helping us to recycle as much as possible. Together, we can do our bit to make Newport a greener place for everyone.”