Views are sought on waste sites hours cut

RESIDENTS in Charnwood are being urged to have their say over plans to reduce opening hours at recycling and household waste sites in Loughborough, Shepshed and Mountsorrel.

Leicestershire County Council is proposing to reduce the daily recycling and household waster sites’ opening hours to 9am to 5pm in the summer (April to September), while leaving winter hours the same.

The authority estimates this will save the council £134,000 by the end of 2020/21. The consultation runs until September 23.

Effectively, Leicestershire County Council wants to close the recycling and household waste sites it owns two hours earlier during the summer. This would include Loughborough, Mountsorrel and Shepshed.

The winter opening hours of 9am to 4pm, five days a week from October to March, would remain in place.

A report about the proposals said although changing the opening hours would result in a change of shift patterns and working hours, initial indications suggested it could be managed without the need for job losses.

Coun Blake Pain, cabinet member for environment and transport, said: “We’re having to make difficult choices across the council in order to continue to make savings.

“We’ve looked at many options across our recycling and household waste sites, including assessing what the impact would be on our site users and the potential savings.

“We’re very committed to not closing any sites as that would have a significant impact on people using them.”

The rest of the savings would be made by introducing a reuse scheme where people can buy back items that others have dumped – and imposing charges for disposing of certain types of waste.

Reducing the amount of waste that the authority puts in landfill is expected to generate a significant saving.

Coun Pain said: “We’re dedicated to supporting any initiatives which help the environment and that includes looking, later in the year, at the way we collect items that could be reused rather than go to landfill, for example, garden tools, mirrors and bric-a-brac.”

The council already uses a permit system for certain vehicles and some types of waste. A charge of £3 per tub/item is made for some types of non-household waste such as concrete, bricks, rubble, windows, slabs and plasterboard.

The proposals also include introducing charges for difficult-to-dispose-of waste, such as car tyres and railway sleepers. The cash from this would go to the authority.

The council said it is working to bring in new measures to prevent commercial fridges and freezers being disposed of at the taxpayers’ expense.

For more details and to have your say, visit https://bit.ly/2XJYHMz