Creating a cleaner and greener Swale
Inside Swale 7
Collecting your bins in the snow Swale experienced heavy snowfall on Monday 20 December 2010. This followed closely on the heels of a previous bout of bad weather. To deal with this situation is never easy and requires strong partnership working with our contractors Verdant, who run the actual collection activity, and Kent Highways who assess the practicalities of moving around the borough. Refuse collectors help clear the high street while waiting for the roads thaw. The Council provides waste collections to around 60,000 properties a week, negotiating 2,500 roads for access, using up to ten freighters a day.
“We will work with our partners to improve our services”
The main issue we face in adverse weather is the unpredictability of how different the weather can be across the borough, making it difficult to give residents a truly clear picture of the estimated length of disruption. Some side roads thaw quicker than others too. So our clear, consistent message to residents in December was ‘Put your bin out on the correct day and we will get to it as soon as we can’. This worked really well. We posted updates on our website at www.swale. gov.uk/snow and released the information to local and regional media to pass on to residents and updated our facebook site and twitter feed. We appreciate that from time to time as our refuse collection freighters go around the borough they can cause temporary obstruction, but Verdant employees work as quickly and safely (for themselves and the public) as possible to minimise any issues that arise on the highway, so please bear with us. We welcome your feedback about how you feel we perform at all times and know that we can improve further. With your feedback we will be even better prepared the next time the snow descends upon our corner of Kent. http://tiny.cc/Swale-FB
www.swale.gov.uk