Our roads have been eerily quiet in the mornings lately. Depending on your garbage collection day, the sound of council garbage trucks have been missing.

Facebook groups have been asking the question "why"?

The Lismore City Council offered this explanation.

"Lismore City Council has experienced some issues with kerbside waste collection last week. A combination of a number of factors has resulted in collection trucks being unable to complete daily bin collections.

With some staff on overdue leave, an unexpected truck break down, combined with unplanned leave and issues with extended overtime periods being accrued resulted in a several hundred bins not being collected last week. 

Council’s Director of Infrastructure Services Peter Jeuken said: “We have experienced issues that normally we would be able to roster around, but when we have multiple issues impact our collection service there is not a lot of spare capacity in our resourcing to cover a large gap in this service.”

“The garbage truck is currently being repaired and will be back on the road in several days, collection truck drivers are doing additional hours and shifts and we are looking at external resources to help us catch up on our missed bin collections.”

Residents with missed bins have been asked to leave their bins out for collection and it is expected Council staff will be able to get all the missed bins from last Thursday and Friday collected by the end of this week.

It is also important to make sure people put their bins out the night before collection, because Council will need to do some bin collections in the early hours of the morning because we are down one collection truck".

This response may not satisfy some residents but at least we all know what's going on.