Fly-tipping blights communities and cost councils valuable resources to deal with.

There are a number of ways you can recycle or dispose of your waste.

Firstly, ordinary household waste. In Gloucester, you can recycle a range of items on the doorstep, including cardboard in the blue bag, and plastic, glass, foil, and cans/tins in the green box. Food waste can go in the brown bin and the council will collect small broken electrical items such as kettles and toasters. Simply leave them (one item per collection) on top of your green boxes.

Recycling is collected weekly in Gloucester. You can also sign up for the garden waste scheme if you produce a lot of clippings etc from your garden.

There is a page on the council website with lots of information about the various services available. https://www.gloucester.gov.uk/environment-waste-recycling/waste-recycling-and-street-cleaning/bins-and-recycling/

For everything that can’t be recycled it’s the black residual waste bin which is collected fortnightly in Gloucester.

Other items that can be recycled but not on the doorstep can be taken eg to the the supermarket (for batteries and carrier bags, for example) or to the Household Recycling Centre at Hempsted (used lightbulbs and a whole host of larger items).

For large household items (bulky waste) there is a collection service offered by the city council. It costs £24 for up to three items, with each extra item up to six items in total, costing £8. If you are in receipt of housing or council tax benefit the fee is £12 up to 3 items and each additional item is £4. Full details are on the council website here.

For goods that could be sold on for charity, you could take books, clothes, records and bric a brac to charity shops. Be aware that many are currently swamped with items so do check first to see what rules they have about donations. If you have items of value such as rare books, CDs, records or DVDs, you can look them up via a smartphone barcode scanner and sell them via eBay, musicMagpie or Ziffit.

The Furniture Recycling Project in Gloucester is also a great way to donate furniture. There are lots of great sites such as Freecycle and newcomer Olio which encourage free swapping and in Olio’s case allocate spare food and household goods to others.

There is almost always a way to dispose of things safely or to get them recycled so that others can enjoy them. Fly-tipping should never be the answer!