Ernie Clark. Hilperton Division, Wiltshire Council.

Household Recycling Centres ready for longer opening hours.
All ten HRCs will be open at least eight hours a day, every day, until October 31 (see below for exact details). They will also be open during Easter.

Easter falls early this year with Good Friday on March 21 and it is expected that the recycling centres will be busy with people starting on their spring cleaning. The bank holiday will also mean changes to the black box kerbside collection.

The kerbside collection of black boxes will operate as normal on Good Friday (March 21) but the following week every collection will be a day later. The one on Monday March 24 will take place on Tuesday March 25 and so on. The collection returns to normal on Monday March 31.

From April 1, eight of the HRCs will stay open until 7pm on Wednesday and Thursday evenings and 5pm on other evenings. The remaining two at Warminster and Salisbury will be open until 8pm every day.

The recycling centres take a wide range of materials from car batteries and cardboard to fluorescent light tubes, gas bottles, glass, green garden waste, metals, motor oil, and plastic bottles. Textile banks at the HRCs are great places for your old clothes while recycling centres are just the place for rubble, timber and unused paints. They all now take chipboard and MDF.

The county's HRCs are operated by the county council's waste contractors Hills Group. Locally, they are at Melksham and Trowbridge.