Cleaner Greener Streets

Cleaner greener is all about ensuring that Charnwood is a cleaner, greener place to live, work and play.

Charnwood Borough Council carries out a number of services that relate to keeping the streets clean including dealing with abandoned vehicles, recycling & waste, street cleaning (including removal of dog waste), litter, fly-tipping.

Just follow the links in the navigation on the left of the page for information on all the services covered by this area.

Environmental Services Contract

Serco are the contractor used by Charnwood Borough Council to carry out refuse and recycling collections and street cleaning. Serco have waste management contracts with other Local Authorities across the country, and are a well respected provider of these services.

The contract between Serco and Charnwood Borough Council was carefully put together, and used Community and Member Reference Panels to ensure that it meets the needs of the users of the service. The contract started on 1st August 2009, and will run until 31st March 2017. The contract is managed through a series of Key Performance Indicators, which set out Charnwood Borough Council's aspirations for the future and apply financial rewards and penalties to incentivise the Contractor to meet these aspirations.

Progress against these Key Performance Indicators is monitored every month. and again at the end of each financial year, when the financial rewards and penalties for the year are established. Contract Key Performance Indicator's - December 2009 (PDF Document, 0.1 Mb)

For current information about the new green recycling bin, click here.

Increased satisfaction with Charnwood's waste collection and street cleaning services.

Residents' satisfaction with their waste collection and street cleaning services has been boosted thanks to a new way of working by Charnwood Borough Council.

As part of Charnwood's new Environmental Services Contract with Serco, which began on 1st August 2009, Serco are required to carry out quarterly telephone surveys with 200 residents to gauge levels of satisfaction with the services offered.

The first survey was carried out in January 2010, with a second in April 2010. The results are very encouraging, showing that the majority are satisfied with the services.

The two surveys show that 92.4 per cent were either very or fairly satisfied with their garden waste collection, roughly 90 per cent with their recycling collection, 89 per cent with their bulky household waste collection, and 88 per cent with their general refuse collection. A total of 72 per cent were satisfied with the levels of street cleanliness in the Borough.

The results of the latest surveys compare favourably to a survey carried out in 2008 when roughly 79 per cent were either very or fairly satisfied with the wheelie bin service, and 47 per cent were satisfied with the Street Cleaning service.

Since August 2009, Serco has been the council's waste contractor. Since then there has been a number of changes including:

• Initially moving from red and green bags and a green box for recycling to a purple sack and a green box. Then in September 2011 replacing the purple sack and green box with a new green recycling bin, simplifying the service even more.
• Street cleaning has moved to being output based so the streets are cleaned when they need cleaning, rather than when they are scheduled to be cleaned. This gives greater flexibility and results in cleaner streets.
• Older refuse collection vehicles have been replaced with seven new state-of-the-art refuse vehicles
• Street cleaning vehicles have been branded which raises the profile of the service so that people notice when their streets are being cleaned.

Kath Kay, Charnwood Borough Council's Waste Policy Manager, said: "The latest surveys show what a positive difference the new contract with Serco has made to the refuse and recycling collections and street cleaning in Charnwood, and we're delighted with the results".

The April survey shows that 37% of respondents are recycling more since we introduced the single purple sack for recycling, alongside the green box for glass. This is great news, and shows that the simplified recycling service is working well for the residents of Charnwood". Another survey will follow after the introduction of the green recycling bin.

For more information about the council's waste collections services visit the Recycling and Waste webpage.

REPORT A PROBLEM WITH GRAFFITI OR FLY TIPPING ONLINE