Douglas Council has announced that it will be cutting bin collections from weekly to fortnightly later this year.

However, many local authorities have only ever operated on a fortnightly collection basis.

We asked people what they thought of this move, and how the provision for waste collection is in their area.

Brenda, 75, and Brian Walton, 76, from Ballabeg, told us that they were already on fortnightly bin collections.

’And we have been for 40 years,’ said Brenda.

Brian said: ’It will be shock at first [for Douglas residents], but we’ve never known anything different where we live.’

’There’s lots of people who say have a big family, that will probably need to get two or three bins - one bin will be no good at all,’ he said.

Brenda added: ’We’re just retired now so it suits us just fine, but I can imagine if you don’t have kerbside collection [recycling] services, like we don’t, then it would be difficult.’

However, she said that when her daughter lived in Douglas the kerbside recycling seemed ’very hit and miss’.

And Brian expressed confusion how they could pay higher rates in Ballabeg for fortnightly collections, whereas those in other areas pay less and get weekly ones.

When we spoke to Judy Norris, who lives in Onchan, she said weekly collections would ’be no problem at all,’ with Pip Norris adding that it was ’fine with us’, because they try to recycle most of their rubbish.

Asked if he thought this was part of a push to encourage people to recycle, Pip raised concerns about the fact that the island’s plastic waste is shipped off to the UK to join the ’quarter of a million tonne’ pile of plastic there, instead of being burned in the energy from waste plant here.

’Paper and glass recycling here is great, but plastics, and I don’t know where tin goes, I presume off island - it seems silly to recycle just to meet targets when it [plastics] could be used for fuel here.’

When we asked Richard Darnill, 69, Port St Mary, he said ’We used to have recycling, they used to collected kerbside which was great, and we all recycled and had collections once a week.

’But then they couldn’t afford to collect the recycling, it was costing too much.’

He said that despite having always having recycled himself, that he thought kerbside recycling services were a great incentive to get people to do it.

However, he said that there were ’excellent services’ for normal waste collection in the village, which is once a week.

Richard thinks this is important ’health wise’, that it should be done this regularly, particularly for food waste out of consideration for the bin men.

Susan Mazzilli, 48, from Port St Mary, said her bin collection was fortnightly and so she was used to it.

’I don’t think it makes a lot of difference, because they’re providing other ways of people being greener and everything, so I would say that it’s not a bad thing.

Recycling facilities in Rushen were good she said, with the option for kerbside recycling, but her family relying on things like the bottle banks and amenity site because they were close by.

’Around Christmas it is a bit of a struggle, you obviously have a lot more that you need to put in the bin - but you just sort of learn to deal with it, and that you’re finding other ways [of disposing of it],’ Susan said.

’In fact it probably is greener, because you’re not as ready to throw rubbish in the bin because you know that’s going to take up space’.