WASTE bosses are ploughing £50,000 into clearing the city's unemptied bins backlog.

And the city council has apologised for the problems created by a complete overhaul of its collection system.

Meanwhile the authority, which has been under fire for allowing green and normal waste to be mixed, has vowed it will not happen again.

It also revealed that "it is dealing'' with the staff member who issued orders for binmen to mix the refuse in a desperate attempt to get on top of the issue of missed bins.

Paul Robinson, corporate director for environmental services, said the orders had not been approved by the council and the practice had been stopped as soon as it came to light.

"We apologise for the difficulties some customers have encountered as we have gone through this major change," he said. "We are working to bring back customer satisfaction levels."

Yesterday, Labour councillor Ranjit Banwait joined Alvaston resident Colin Brown as he took the contents of his unemptied bin to the Council House in protest over missed collections.

Mr Brown said his bin had not been emptied for four weeks.

"I just can't understand why they changed the system in the first place. The old one worked fine and the bins were always emptied on time but now it's just chaos," he said.

But the council said the old bin collection system did need changing to make it more up-to-date and to cope with an extra 6,000 homes being added to its kerbside recycling scheme.

The authority has been adding new properties to bin crews' rounds for many years as homes were built. But it meant the rounds were not evenly spread, with some crews working nine-hour days and others five hours.

On top of that, the council decided to expand its recycling scheme from the end of January but these could not be added to existing rounds which were already full, so the council reviewed its system.

Mr Robinson said: "The first option would have seen 99% of residents' having the day their bins were collected changed. That would have caused chaos.

"We, therefore, asked for another option to be created which would mean no changes in collection day for the majority of households."

The result was a system which saw 96% of households stay on the same collection day but instead the change was passed on to the bin crews who were put on to unfamiliar rounds.

It has caused delays as the staff have had to get used to new streets and rounds, meaning not all the bins have been reached on their usual days.

Mr Robinson said, however, that about 99% of the 180,000 bins the authority collects each week had not been affected and that the council was doing "everything possible" to sort out issues with the remaining 1%.

That includes paying £20 extra per day to staff – or £50,000 in total – for the first six weeks since the new rounds system came into operation.

This pays for additional collections and extra time spent on the paperwork needed to provide management with details of areas where there are problems.

A collection system has also been brought in to empty trade waste bins which have been missed.

Mr Robinson said some changes had been made.

"Some rounds have been tweaked with this feedback because what looks good on a computer programme sometimes needs adjusting in reality because of things like traffic playing a part in the time it takes to do rounds," he said.

It could take two more weeks for the service to get back to normal, as the council said it needed three complete cycles of the fortnightly bin collections – or six weeks from the new system's start date of January 25 – to resolve all the issues.

Last week the city council received 1,100 calls about missed bins – out of 180,000 it collects each week.