OVER the next few weeks every household in Swindon will receive a letter from the council outlining important changes to kerbside waste and recycling services.

It is important to stress that there will be no change to the frequency of collections you receive. Waste and recycling arrangements will remain fortnightly and blue bags will still be picked up weekly.

The changes, which come into effect from Monday, October 31, are part of a drive to make the service more efficient and reliable and we expect savings of around £300,000 a year.

Around half of Swindon’s 97,000 households will see a change in the day of the week their waste is collected, although any change to collections will be no more than three working days beyond the current collection date.

At the council we constantly strive to make our services as efficient as possible and, with Swindon having grown so much over the last few years, we conducted a review of our current waste and recycling routes.

We found that by altering the routes we could better balance the workloads of our crews and reduce our fleet of waste and recycling lorries from 32 to 29.

The recent good take-up of the paid-for green waste recycling service also made it difficult to keep up with demand in some areas. To deal with this, the new routes that have been devised may mean some areas have their garden waste collected on different days, but it will lead to a more reliable service.

We have also invested in our service by buying a new fleet of vehicles, which will come fitted with the latest advanced routing systems, all-round cameras and technology that will alert our drivers to the presence of cyclists.

The routing system will ensure we keep routes to a minimum and avoid carrying out collections at peak-time traffic hot spots.

Although we will be doing all we can to make the service as efficient as possible, we also need your help.

We will be asking everyone to put out all their waste for 6.30am and help our crews by separating recycling in the boxes to make it easier and quicker for the waste to be sorted by our staff at the kerbside.

I appreciate change can be unsettling, so I would urge you to keep an eye out for your letter in the coming weeks to see if the changes affect you.

The council will also be carrying out additional promotional activity in the run-up to the new routes coming to force.