South Oxfordshire District Council
A letter to Garden Waste customers in South Oxfordshire

Dear Garden Waste customers in South Oxfordshire

As you may already be aware, we had to delay the restart of the garden waste collection service after the usual Christmas break. The extended pause is as a result of some staff sickness due to Covid-19 and others having to self-isolate.

We have reviewed the staffing levels and unfortunately we will not be able to restart the service next week, and are currently unable to predict accurately when it will resume.

Despite this setback we are confident that we can honour our commitment to providing the 20 collections a year we offer for this paid for service. We are normally able to offer more collections than this with our extra-large garden waste collections in the Spring and Autumn, and don’t envisage this year being any different, so nobody should be out of pocket.

We will review the situation on a week by week basis, and we will let you know as soon as we are in a position to restart the service. We will keep you updated via our garden waste pages and on our social media sites.

We want to reassure you that along with our contractors Biffa we have explored all the options possible to avoid this situation as we realise that this may cause inconvenience and we are genuinely sorry for this. However, the safety of our crews and residents must always be our number one priority. This will allow the remaining staff to work on the core household waste services (food, recycling and rubbish).

If you would like to dispose of your Christmas tree you can take it to one of Oxfordshire County Council’s Household Waste Recycling Centres. These sites are open but please check their website for opening times and any restrictions, particularly Covid-19 restrictions. Or if you’d rather, you can wait until the garden waste service resumes and we’ll take it then.

Please note that we are not taking on any new garden waste customers at this time and we will review this again when the situation with the service changes.

Again we apologise for any inconvenience and will let you know as soon as we’re able to reinstate the service for existing customers.