Council to clamp down on refuse charge dodgers

HOUSEHOLDERS in Waterford who don’t pay up or who dump their refuse in neighbours’ bins are being warned that they will be caught, have their service withdrawn and be fined.

Waterford County Council is drawing up a database of households using its refuse collection services in a major clampdown on those who fail to pay.

It says it will refuse to collect the rubbish of those failing to register.

The council is gathering customers’ names and addresses for the register and will be advertising the move in the local press over the coming days.

The council’s acting director of environment and planning services, Paul Daly, is appealing to householders to fill their details out in the newspaper coupons beside the adverts and drop them into the designated county council boxes at the shops where they buy their bin tags.

He warned the council would stop collecting refuse from householders who fail to register. “We will give a few warnings to those who fail to register, to give them a full opportunity to do so. There is always a percentage of people who don’t read the newspapers or listen to the radio and won’t get what is going on.”

Mr Daly says the purpose of the register is to enable the council to provide a more professional bin collection service to its customers and to allow it to accurately calculate the costs and usage patterns of the service.

With the database, he says, the council will be able to write to each of its customers to inform them of changes and new developments in the bin collection services.

It will also allow the council to send its customers questionnaires seeking information on their usage of the collections and how they think they could be improve. At the moment, the council estimates it has about 15,500 bin collection customers around the county.

But this is only an approximate figure based on the number of organic brown wheelie bins distributed to households over the past year.

Meanwhile, the council says it will also fine anyone caught dumping rubbish in their neighbour’s bins from next month. The clampdown on penny-pinchers is one for the new provisions of the council’s revised waste by-laws governing the storage and presentation of domestic refuse for collection. The by-laws will come into operation from Thursday, October 13.

The council said anyone caught dumping their household waste in another householder’s wheelie-bin will be liable for a €30 on-the-spot fine.

The revised by-laws also make it an offence to tamper with the microchip on the organic waste brown bin. The penalty is also a €30 fine.