Hamilton’s food scrap bins will not be collected from Wednesday 2 March, due to COVID-19 related staff shortages, so staff can focus on continuing to collect glass, mixed recycling, and rubbish from the kerbside.

Hamilton City Council will continue to re-evaluate the situation to ensure the food scraps collection can be reinstated as soon as staffing levels allow.

Council’s Rubbish and Recycling Manager Trent Fowles said the shortage in staff also means there will likely be delays for glass collections for the next couple of days, but the team are working hard to do what they can to continue to collect your rubbish and recycling.

“The staff able to work will be spread out across the collection teams, with a key focus on catching up on glass collections that have already seen delays due to staff shortages”.

While the food scraps service is not operating, residents can take food scraps to the Lincoln Street Refuse Transfer Station free of charge for a contactless drop-off.

“If you have capacity, food scraps can be stored in a freezer, or can be home composted (excluding meat, bones and shells). If none of these options work, you can put food scraps in the red rubbish bin,” said Fowles.

While our contractors are short on staff, glass will not be sorted at the kerb, but will instead be recycled as mixed coloured glass.

“Our drivers can collect glass faster without colour sorting, this will help them catch up this week.”

Fowles urges residents to please be patient and kind to our drivers while we work through this.

“Council will continue to provide updates on the free mobile app Antenno. This includes when food scraps can be collected again.”

Due to the high numbers of Omicron cases and the isolation requirements, we will have varying staff availability across all Council services, not just rubbish and recycling collections. While we have good planning in place to try and minimise any impact, this will affect our ability to continue some of our services to the community safely.

This includes the connection of new drinking water, stormwater and wastewater services. Unfortunately, current timeframes for new connections are approximately 12-16 weeks from the date a complete application is sent through to Council, depending on its complexity.

If you haven’t downloaded Antenno yet, you can get it free on Google Play or the Apple Store. Alternatively, you can find out about all Council’s services and how they may be impacted by COVID-19 at Hamilton.govt.nz/changes.

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