Local democracy reporter Edward Barnes joined Wirral’s bin collection team on a morning round
As a journalist, you sometimes get accused of writing utter rubbish. However this week, I am writing about it quite literally instead as I spent a morning helping the bin men on a round in Wirral.
At 7 on an October morning, I made my way in the dark to Biffa’s depot close to the Croft Retail Park in Bromborough. Here dozens of lorries are parked up before they set off across the borough to empty your bins.
Workers collects the keys for their lorries at 6:30am and get their schedule for the day. Biffa currently employs around 220 people with over 40 bin vehicles and over 30 for street cleansing vehicles, with maps outlining plans for each area.
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They then head out to collect 350,000 bins a week getting their steps in and sometimes walking 13km or more a day. One might think wheeling a bin to the back of the lorry is quite easy but there is a knack to it.
However practice makes perfect and once I got a few goes, I was having more success catching it first time. For those doing it for years, it’s no issue clearing a cul-de-sac in less than a minute and I did get the sense I may be slowing the team down. Not much time for waiting when you’ve got thousands of bins to collect.
Gary Salisbury, who has been working in the bin service for 20 years, is out on the round in Caldy. With its wider streets and fewer parked cars, he said driving through it was a doddle, adding: “The challenges we have are Liscard and Wallasey. People who park their cars anywhere and you just have to get on with it. Sometimes you have to mount the kerb to get around. There’s nothing you can do.”
It’s an early start with some workers leaving the house at half five in the morning and it can be a dangerous job manning heavy machinery out on busy roads at rush hour. Despite this, Wirral’s waste collection depot recently celebrated two years with no accidents.
However Gary said: “A couple of the lads have been hit. It’s near misses all the time,” adding: “Sometimes people don’t give us the respect that we deserve. It’s hard on the job. What is a pain in the backside is when you are going down a road and there’s parked cars, they will go onto the kerb to get around you.”
The job is understandably tiring too – walking several kilometres and wheeling bins that can sometimes feel like they weigh a tonne. However workers who spoke to the ECHO said they enjoyed the job as it was social and meant they were outside for the whole shift, though how enjoyable that was was weather dependent.
Jim McKinnon started out on garden waste rounds but now trains up new workers. He said: “I like it. It’s much better than being in a factory,” adding: “It says something when you find a job and no one leaves, no one voluntarily leaves the job. You either get sacked or you retire.
“The lads go above and beyond. If someone is struggling to get their bins out, they will go out and help them. They’re on the same rounds so they get to know the people.”
He said: “Covid surprised me, I didn’t realise we were that popular,” adding: “We went down a road in Heswall and everyone came out of their gardens clapping and it was weird.
“That was lovely. It’s the stuff that makes it. It’s dead social. It’s kids in the window waving. You wouldn’t get that on any other job really.”
Wirral Council is currently reviewing its bin contract ahead of its current contract with waste company Biffa expiring in 2027. The local authority is currently exploring three different options for future bin collections as it prepares to spend more than £300m over the next 15 years.
The current Biffa contract covers all household waste and recycling collections, waste collection from council premises and schools, and street cleansing of adopted highways, pavements and alleyways. However, collection of litter and fly tipping on other council land, including parks, is not part of this contract.
At a meeting in July, councillors agreed to develop a business case to either outsource all services, create a council run company to run all services, or bring street cleaning in house while waste collection is outsourced. Big changes are also around the corner as food waste recycling will be rolled out nationwide by 2026 and an update on the issue is expected in January 2025.
Over the last two years, Biffa’s collected bins 17 million times, cleared 26,000 alleyways, cleaned 12,000 streets, and lorries have carried out over 75,000 trips to the Bidston tip. Since 2006, services have been provided through Biffa for roughly 147,000 homes.
Things haven’t always been smooth since Biffa started working for the council in 2006. Biffa was involved in a pay dispute with union Unite at the end of 2022 which saw strikes take place in the lead up to Christmas. Collections were disrupted for weeks long after the strikes were called off, leading to heavy criticism of the company.
Earlier this year, Biffa secured an agreement with Unite for a further pay rise until March 2025. Ms Dawson said issues around pay were an industry wide problem at the time in 2022 due to high inflation and the company has a good relationship with unions going into next year.
The company was criticised earlier this year by Conservative councillors who claimed they’d been “inundated with calls and emails from residents” about problems and in 2023 said the service had been “hit and miss” after 165 collections were missed on 12 roads.
This is equal to around 14 bins per street or one bin every three to four weeks. Jolene Dawson, collections manager, said they had a target of 30 missed collections per 100,000 but currently they only missed between 20 and 25 bins for every 100,000 collected.
She said sometimes workers simply didn’t see the bins, putting it down to human error, adding: “When you are working in such a big operation in such an environment, there will always be a margin for error however small.
“There’s always room for improvement. I think that service levels can always be improved, certainly with the missed bin rates. The ambition is to have zero missed bin rates and 100% of streets cleaned.”
Ms Dawson said many people also will only see a bin lorry as it comes down their street, adding: “I think people don’t understand the scale. You only know what you know,” adding: “When somebody says how hard is it to collect a bin, some of the things we do struggle with when the vehicles are on the road collecting bins, you have road works to contend with every day, other road users, and some of the behaviour of motorists and frustration that brings.
“Most people do not appreciate the sheer size of the vehicles and that is one of the biggest myths to dispel. They are that big and they still get through those every day of the week.
“They squeeze into areas that you would think you would never get into. Every road we have on the Wirral, a bin lorry has been down there. Our drivers do a fantastic job in difficult conditions sometimes.”
