RUBBISH festered in a Greenbank street over the holidays after ‘confused’ residents missed council bin collections.

Bins on Marshall Lane were left overflowing with excess Christmas waste and one resident, 48-year-old Mark Atkins, said it is the first year this problem has occurred.

Mr Atkins believes the tags Cheshire West and Chester Council placed on bins to advise residents of a change to green waste collections had resulted in confusion.

“The bits of paper they put on the bins with collection times were very confusing” he said.

“A lot of people down the road have said the same and they’ve ended up with six or seven bags of rubbish outside their house.

“We recycle 99% of our things, but a lot of families had children over for Christmas, so there are big boxes and along the row of shops there is a lot of rubbish.

“We haven’t had this problem before. It was the labels with the dates that got everyone confused as they said the normal collection was revised, but these weren’t collected.

“We were told the green waste was nothing to do with our black bin, people have been very confused and put the green bins out at Christmas and not the black bin.”

However, Cheshire West and Chester Council said they had done their best to make residents aware of the changes to green waste collection and that there was no change to the black bin schedule.

A Council spokesperson said: “The only change to the green waste – which is normally collected weekly – was to make it a two week collection.

“The green bins were collected on Monday, December 30 and the next collection will be Monday, January 13.”