A MONTH'S worth of rubbish has not been collected from one Penhill street.

Dozens of bags of plastic for recycling are piling high in Urchfont Way and Sally Clark has had enough.

She says she reported the problem to Swindon Borough Council on May 7 but has yet to receive a reply.

“It’s just really frustrating,” said Sally who works for the NHS CCG Referral Support Centre.

“The last two collections, the bin men have come along and piled the plastics up like they do ready for them to collect it, and then they’ve not come back.

“So we’ve now got four weeks worth of plastics recycling piled up.”

Sally, who has lived in the street for 12 years, said the rubbish pile consists of recycling from around 30 houses, including those on Oaksey Road.

“With the winds we’ve been having, you can imagine how light plastics are. They’ve been blown everywhere,” she added.

“You get vehicles going past and especially now you get a lot more delivery trucks going down and just wafting past the bags and because there’s no weight to them. They blow off the pile and then get split and it just makes the problem worse.

“I take my hat off to the bin men, out there doing a job that nobody wants to be doing, especially at this time, but this needs to be cleared up,” she said.

Sally sent photos of the problem to the council, which will be reopening its household waste recycling centre at Waterside Park on Wednesday.

She added: “I’m sure it’s all probably related to staffing numbers and things affected by Covid-19.

“It’s just frustrating because under normal circumstances if the tip was open you could get rid of it there.

“Some of the neighbours have been going round collecting it and putting it back on the pile, but that’s not going to stop the problem,” Sally said.

She estimated that originally the pile reached about 6ft tall and 10ft wide.

“The next recycling collection isn’t due until May 20, and that will be six weeks by then,” Sally said.

“We all try to do our best with the recycling because it’s better for the environment but then this just undoes that.”

A council spokesman said: “We’re sure that most residents fully recognise the pressure we have been under as a result of the coronavirus crisis.

“Our waste collection teams have been working extremely hard to ensure these vital services are able to continue and we would ask residents to bear with us if the occasional collection is missed.

"We are looking into the reports of missed collections on Urchfront Way and Oaksey Road.”