Keeping our borough clean

Clean streets

Clean and tidy streets are very important in making H&F a pleasant place to live in and work in, and to visit. Here’s what we do to help that:

we spend £21m keeping the borough clean and our workers are out in all weather
we collect rubbish and recycling from 57,000 households every week
our street cleaners cover distances of more than 150 miles each week
last year we collected around 59,000 tonnes of recycling and rubbish
we take a tough stance against anyone dropping litter, creating graffiti or dumping rubbish.

Our cleaning programme

We’re responsible for keeping around 150 miles of carriageway and 310 miles of footways across the borough clean and tidy.

Map showing the cleansing classifications for the borough’s roads (pdf)

main roads are scheduled for at least 16 hours’ continuous cleaning, 7 days a week.
other roads are swept at least once a week on the same day as your refuse and recycling collection.
8am to 4pm - our neighbourhood sweepers clean all residential streets.
6am to 2am – we clean all main shopping centres and busy streets over the course of the day, including emptying litterbins and clearing flytips

Cleaning parks

Our contractor Idverde cleans our parks. For more information about Idverde please see parks maintenance.

If you need a skip on any part of the highway (public road), you must apply to us for a skip permit. More about skips

Litterbins

Our contractors empty litterbins in main roads and shopping areas at least once a day, including Sunday. In our busier pedestrian areas, bins are emptied on average twice a day.

You can put most litter and general waste in litter bins, including dog waste. There are also small recycling bins outside most stations for newspapers and magazines. But, there are some items which you can’t put in a litter bin:

raw meat
medical waste
sharp objects
electronic goods
batteries
hazardous materials or chemicals
household waste – recycling and rubbish are collected at least once a week from every household:

Some of these types of waste can still be recycled somewhere else.
If you can't find it on our recycling page, then it must be collected as refuse.

If you want to report a problem with street cleaning, you can: