Glass crates are making their much anticipated come-back to the Western Bay kerbside collection service.

The blue glass crates will return to kerbside collection schedules from Monday, April 11.

Food waste collections are still unable to be collected.

"The reinstation of glass crate collection comes as Western Bay of Plenty District Council's Kerbside Collective contractors begin to get back behind the wheel after isolating as household contacts or positive cases of Covid-19," says Council's Deputy CEO and Group Manager Infrastructure, Gary Allis.

"While some drivers have returned to work, we do not yet have the capacity to bring food waste collections back online."

Gary says they are thrilled to announce glass collections are coming back.

"We know how great our community is at recycling, and how eager they will be to get their glass crates back on the kerbside.

'We're very grateful to everyone for their patience during this time.”

Gary says to everyone who was able to hold onto all of their clean, empty glass jars – please remember that contractors can't take over filled crates – level with the crate lip is the most that can be collected at once.

"And please remember that extra bins or glass placed on the kerbside alongside the Council-approved crate will not be collected."

The non-official containers and cardboard boxes tend to get overloaded and fall apart when handled. This can lead to broken glass on roads and footpaths, causing potential health and safety risks and further delays for our kerbside collections team.

”We ask that excess glass is slowly fed back into your recycling over the next few rounds of collections if necessary, or taken to one of our community recycling centres.

'Drivers have to manually sort the glass at the kerbside, and lifting an overfull crate could lead to an injury.

'Also our collection trucks can only collect a set volume, if we were to take all the glass our community have carefully stored, it would probably fill our collection trucks before they finish their daily run, and people at the end of the run wouldn't get their glass collected at all.”

The team continues to work on getting food waste collections back online.

"Until then you can freeze your food waste, add it to your worm farm or compost, or as a last resort – place it in the red lid rubbish bin."

Check when your next glass collection is with the Council's collection day finder kerbsidecollective.co.nz/collection-day/

Sign up to Council's free kerbside collection day reminders by downloading the Antenno app.

"Each week we'll send notifications to your smart phone the night before your collection day westernbay.govtnz/antenno ," says Gary.