NORMAL service has resumed for bin collections around West Fife.

Householders had been subject to delays in recent weeks due to an “unprecedented” amount of breakdowns affecting Fife Council bin lorries.

Towards the end of April, residents hit by the disruption were advised to leave their bins out beyond the usual collection day as workers battled to tackle the backlog.

Service manager Derek Crowe this week apologised for the recent situation and confirmed staff were back to delivering services as usual.

“Our teams are working hard to deliver a reliable and quality service,” he said.

“The Fife domestic waste collection team operate with 30 bin lorries on a twin shift system five days a week, with nine located in West Fife. 

“To provide resilience to the vehicle fleet, we have seven service replacement bin lorries that cover for breakdowns and planned servicing of the frontline fleet. 

“In the vast majority of occasions, these service replacements allow us to operate a seamless operation without any disruption to planned services. 

“The recent spate of vehicle breakdowns in West Fife was unprecedented. 

“Even with all service replacements being used in the fleet, there were recurring days when the West Fife service was either one or two vehicles down.”

Mr Crowe said that because of their twin shift system which aims to maximise their use of bin lorries, a double impact is experienced when a vehicle is not available to service planned routes.

“This caused a large backlog to develop and it required significant and sustained efforts by the waste operational teams and our fleet operations colleagues to overcome this major challenge,” he added.

“Gladly, we are back to business as usual with all of our West Fife collections and I thank the public for their patience whilst we dealt with this untypical backlog period.”