A Marlow resident says the council needs to “buck up its ideas” after experiencing a string of problems with his recycling collections.

Jim Hunter, who lives in Newfield Road, said issues with the collections seemed to start when the service was taken over by Serco.

He said the waste collectors once refused to take his recycling bin because it was “contaminated” despite a supervisor later admitting it was not and his bins have previously been lost or not put back in the right garden.

Mr Hunter said he was also told residents in the area are producing “too much” cardboard and that it was down to the discretion of the rubbish collectors as to whether or not they take it.

He said: “They seem to just pick and choose what they want to take. There are lots of issues.

“They don’t seem to be able to put the bins back in the right gardens. I have had to walk up the road to get them back and I have even had to pay out for replacement bins because they have been lost.

“The council asks us to recycle and you take time out of your day to do it but you end up wondering if you should just put it all in the black bin and it end up in the landfill.

“I used to work for Biffa Waste for over 30 years so I know all about recycling and how important it is but it makes you so annoyed. It is a constant fight to get them to take recycling.”

Mr Hunter said he was “annoyed” when he was told his recycling bin was contaminated and not collected and questioned why residents should recycle.

He said: “If I knew what the contamination was I could take it out, but there was nothing in there that hadn’t been in there before.

“The council said they would send out a supervisor to have a look but I waited a week and nobody came out. I called again and a supervisor finally came out and they said they couldn’t find anything wrong with it.

“When the council finally collected it, the bin men put it in with all the general waste from the black bin. It really annoyed me because you spend a lot of time recycling, making sure the containers are clean and in the right bins.”

Sue Robinson, a spokesman for Wycombe District Council, said: “We've been in regular contact with Mr Hunter and we've apologised to him directly for letting him down on this occasion. Our collection crews made a mistake and reported the wrong property as having a contaminated recycling bin and we unfortunately, we didn't resolve his complaint as promptly as we should have done. 

“To avoid further delays and inconvenience instead of waiting another week for his regular recycling collection, we sent the nearest crew available the next day to empty his blue bin. The crew available to make this special collection was a refuse crew which is obviously not our standard practice.

“In terms of paper and cardboard collection, residents can put out extra cardboard boxes next to their recycling boxes. Our crews will collect up to roughly one metre cubed as domestic waste, but if residents do have more they can always use the paper banks at our recycling centres.”