We, like many households, do not have a garden waste bin, because we visit the recycling centre regularly with other items and take our garden waste with us.

Having read that due to the coronavirus, all recycling centres have been closed, I applied to Stroud Council for a garden waste bin, only to be told that, due to the coronavirus situation, they were not accepting any further requests for these bins. In our case, our close neighbours have bins, so the extra manpower required to deal with one more bin on our small estate is very minimal.

How crazy, though, to close off both options. It is totally impractical for us to have a compost heap or bins, so just what are we supposed to do with our garden waste?

It is hard to see how recycling centres represent anything like the risk of spreading virus that for example supermarkets do. They are after all outdoors, and most users would only be there for 5 minutes or so.

SDC and Gloucestershire County Council need to urgently re-think this, otherwise I can envisage people wrongly fly-tipping their garden waste because they literally cannot store it for what we are told could be up to 6 months!

Bob Kingsland

Stroud