New bin lorries roll out in Bromsgrove

A fleet of 15 new bin lorries is arriving in Bromsgrove District to keep household waste and recycling collections running smoothly.

The modern vehicles are replacing older refuse trucks that have reached the end of their service life.

It’s part of Bromsgrove District Council’s ongoing commitment to delivering efficient, reliable, and resilient waste collection services for residents.

Cllr Karen May, Leader of Bromsgrove District Council, said: “Good planned investments in our vehicle fleet help ensure reliable bin collections and efficient services for our residents.”

Refuse collection vehicles typically need replacing every seven years to maintain reliability, owing to the heavy mechanical demands of the job. Bromsgrove’s fleet empties around 2.6 million bins a year across an 84-square-mile district.

To support that, the district council allocates a capital budget of about £4.5 million to a strategic vehicle replacement programme.

That’s designed to protect services from suffering too many problems over time, and support the council’s busy garage team to spend less time fixing breakdowns and more time maintaining a wide fleet of local service vehicles, which as well as bin lorries, includes sweepers, mowers, tankers, and vans.

The arrival of the new bin lorries also prompted the replacement of Bromsgrove’s wheeled household bins, as the district had been the last in the country still using a legacy bin design that had become incompatible with modern UK-standard lorries.

Those bin swaps are almost complete, and, like the bins, new bin lorries have been coming in to replace their obsolete counterparts area-by-area. The council is now gearing up to write to its Garden Waste customers to arrange their new brown bins in the new year, as the last leg of the big bin changeover.

Cllr May added: “We had to replace the bins because new trucks simply can’t empty those old ones. But it will benefit taxpayers because it brings us fully in line with the national standard across the board. That’s more efficient than before, and when you’re going round a big district emptying millions of bins, efficiency really matters.”

The old trucks are sold for parts and scrap, with the proceeds going back into the public purse to reduce pressure on council tax.