The paid for service, which costs £52 a year, has been suspended due to the HGV driver shortage that is affecting contractor Urbaser.
The Spanish waste carrier handles bin collections for both Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge.
While the full garden waste service cannot yet be restarted as the contractor doesn’t yet have the resources in place, the Councils in both boroughs have announced an ‘interim measure’ to clear the waste that subscribers have accumulated over the summer.
Both councils will conduct a one-off collection to clear people’s bins given that they have been full for some time.
This service will start Monday (October 18) when crews will empty garden waste in Tunbridge Wells and then, once complete, move to the Monday collections in Tonbridge.
The same process will then progress to Tuesday collections and through each weekday until all rounds are complete.
The Council says this collection will not count as one of the 26 collections subscribers have paid for in their annual subscriptions.
Residents will still be credited in full for the collections missed since the suspension of the service and their contracts will be extended accordingly.
Cllr Matt Bailey, head of sustainability at Tunbridge Wells Borough Council told the Times: “We thank residents for the incredible patience they’ve shown so far during the forced suspension of the service. But we appreciate that many subscribers have full bins from their summer gardening and waste has been sitting in their bins for some time. So it needs to be collected.
“This one-off collection is a step in the right direction and will help alleviate the immediate problem. But we’re still pushing the contractor to get the resources in place to resume the normal fortnightly collections as soon as they can.”
