Eastbourne bin days: collections run on 31 August

Put your bins out as normal on Monday 31 August. Eastbourne is one of the councils that does not move collections for bank holidays, and its own 2026 calendar says so in as many words: “collections will take place as usual on all bank holidays.”

The tip is the opposite. Eastbourne household waste recycling site on St Philip’s Avenue is closed all day on Monday 31 August, which East Sussex County Council lists as a special date overriding its normal hours.

So the bank holiday catches people out in exactly the reverse of the way they expect. Everything below was checked against Eastbourne Borough Council, its waste contractor Environment First, and East Sussex County Council on 24 August 2026.

The four containers, and what goes in each

Eastbourne runs three household collections plus a paid garden waste service. Refuse and recycling alternate on a fortnightly cycle. Food waste is collected every week, on the same day, by a separate crew.

Sources: the council’s 2026 Eastbourne collection calendar and its A to Z of reduce, reuse, recycle.

You get one refuse bin per household, either 180 litres or 240 litres. Extra refuse bins are only approved for households of 10 or more people, or for non-infectious clinical waste. You can have as many recycling bins and food waste caddies as you need. Where a house faces a main street and has nowhere to store a bin, the council will consider issuing recycling bags instead, but that needs approval from the waste depot. All of that is set out on the new and replacement bins page.

Finding your own collection day

The council does not publish a street-by-street list. Its contractor, Environment First, runs the lookup instead, and it is the only route to a personal calendar.

• Enter your postcode on the Environment First collection day lookup, then pick your address.
• The result page gives your next refuse, recycling and garden waste dates.
• From there you can download a PDF calendar for the whole of 2026, or an ICS file that drops the dates straight into a phone or Outlook calendar.

The ICS route is worth knowing about, because the council’s own web pages do not mention it.

Bank holidays and Christmas

Eastbourne’s printed calendar carries a single line under the heading BANK HOLIDAYS: collections take place as usual. Every 2026 bank holiday Monday, including 31 August, appears on the calendar as a normal collection date.

Christmas is the exception, and it is handled by moving collections to a Saturday rather than pushing everything a day later. Last Christmas the council moved:

• Thursday 25 December to Saturday 20 December, five days earlier
• Friday 26 December to Saturday 27 December
• Thursday 1 January to Saturday 3 January

Everything else in Eastbourne was unaffected. The dates for Christmas 2026 have not been published yet. When they are, they will appear on the council’s Christmas and New Year bin collections page, which currently still shows last year’s arrangements.

Christmas trees are collected free from drop-off points in the parks and seafront car parks, over roughly five weeks from mid-December. If you subscribe to garden waste you can cut the tree up and put it in the brown-lidded bin instead, as long as it is under 100mm across.

Food waste: new to Eastbourne this year

Eastbourne only started collecting food waste from homes in spring 2026. Caddies went out from the week beginning 7 April and collections started from the week beginning 27 April 2026. It is free.

The practical points, from the council’s food waste scheme page:

• It is collected weekly, on your normal bin day, by separate electric vehicles. It may come earlier or later than your other bins.
• Put the outside caddy out by 7am with the handle locked forward.
• Use compostable liners only. Plastic bags are rejected, including ones sold as biodegradable.
• Using it is optional, and you can ask for the containers back if you decide it is not for you.
• It goes to the Woodlands in-vessel composting facility at Whitesmith, north of Hailsham, and comes back as soil conditioner.

Flats and houses in multiple occupation were left out of the initial rollout. The council said in the spring that more information for communal blocks would follow “later in the summer”. As of today nothing further has been published, so if you live in a block you still have no confirmed start date.

One inconsistency to be aware of: the council’s own household waste collection service page still says food waste is “currently only available in Lewes district”. That line is out of date.

Garden waste costs £84 a year in Eastbourne

The subscription runs from 1 April to 31 March and costs £84 per bin. Note that this is a different price from the Lewes district side of the same shared council, where the first bin is £89 and extra bins are £59.

What £84 buys, per the garden waste page:

• a free 240 litre brown-lidded bin, usually delivered within 10 working days
• fortnightly collections through to the following March
• a four-week winter break from mid-December to mid-January, with no collections at all

The traps are in the small print:

• Joining late does not cut the price. Sign up in November and you pay the full £84 to the end of March.
• You cannot pay monthly. It is the full annual fee per bin, in one go.
• If you do not renew by 31 March the service stops and you have to start again from scratch.
• A lost, stolen or damaged garden waste bin costs £50 to replace, delivery included.
• Cancelling after the first 14 days but within 12 weeks of signing up costs a £10 fee.
• Moving out of the borough gets you no refund for the rest of the year.

You can legitimately share a bin, and the cost, with a neighbour. The bin has to stay registered to one property.

Bulky waste: £52 for three items

Eastbourne charges a minimum of £52 for up to three items, then £11 for each additional item. Again this differs from Lewes district, which is priced in bands of £57 for one to five items and £88 for six to ten.

The council will not take asbestos, builders’ rubble, flammable materials, garden waste, pianos, soil or tyres.

Before you book, three conditions that catch people out:

• Items must be easily accessible at the front or rear of the property, whichever is closer to the road. Crews will not go inside, and will not open a garage.
• No time slots are given, so everything has to be outside and safe to leave from 7am on the day.
• Crews will not knock on the door.

Free alternatives are listed on the council’s bulky waste page, including collections by Furniture Now, Age UK East Sussex, the British Heart Foundation and St Wilfrid’s Hospice.

Missed collections: you have 48 hours

Eastbourne’s rule is tighter than most, and it is time limited.

• Your bin has to have been out by 7am.
• If it has not been emptied by 3pm on your collection day, you can report it.
• The report must be made within 48 hours of the collection day, or it will not be accepted.

Crews log which bins were and were not put out on the boundary. If yours was not out, the council will not come back, even if it was a genuine mistake, and you wait for the next round. You can report a missed collection online and track the status of the report afterwards.

If getting bins out is difficult because of illness, injury or disability, ask for an assisted collection, which is free and can be requested at any time.

The tip: St Philip’s Avenue, and you must book

Eastbourne’s household waste recycling site is at St Philip’s Avenue, BN22 8NB, and is run by East Sussex County Council rather than the borough.

Source: East Sussex County Council.

The weekend closing time is the one people miss. The site shuts at noon on Saturday and Sunday, four hours earlier than on a weekday.

Other rules that decide whether you can get in at all:

• All users have had to book in advance since 24 November 2025. Slots can be booked for the same day, and up to two weeks ahead.
• Vans are allowed on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays only, with limits on weight and type.
• The vehicle height limit is 2 metres.
• Trailers are allowed up to 1.8 metres. Trailers up to 2.4 metres are allowed on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Some waste is charged. Hardcore, rubble, soil and plasterboard have a free allowance of two 50 litre bags, or one item, per week, and cost money beyond that. Asbestos and tyres have no free allowance at all and are charged per bag, sheet or tyre, with monthly limits.

Five things Eastbourne treats differently

These are the ones worth knowing, because they are not what most councils do.

• Plastic carrier bags and soft plastic film go in your green bin. The council names bread bags, delivery bags, frozen food bags, multipack wrapping, toilet roll wrapping and salad, pasta and rice bags. They have to be empty and clean.
• Cartons were added on 1 April 2026. Tetra Pak and waxed juice, milk and soup cartons now go in the recycling bin, emptied and ideally rinsed. If you last checked before this spring, the answer has changed.
• No batteries or vapes in any bin, ever. The council’s guidance, updated on 20 August 2026, is blunt: “no, absolutely not”, for both the recycling and the refuse bin. They start fires in the vehicles. Take them to the tip or to a shop collection point.
• Textiles go in neither bin. Clothes, shoes and bags need a clothing bank or the tip. Bedding, duvets and pillows should not go in the refuse bin either, per the county council, and need to go to the tip.
• The tip recycles less plastic than your kerbside bin does. At home, plastic bottles, pots, tubs, trays and bags all go in the green bin. At St Philip’s Avenue only plastic bottles are recycled, and pots, tubs, trays and bags go into general waste. Empty plant pots are an exception, and are accepted at Eastbourne as hard plastic.

The government’s Simpler Recycling rules took effect on 1 April 2026. The council says its services already complied and that nothing changed here as a result.

Where to check next

• Environment First for your collection day, PDF calendar and calendar file
• Bins, waste and recycling for the council’s own service pages
• A to Z of reduce, reuse, recycle for a specific item, with 124 entries
• Eastbourne roadworks and travel if a closure is blocking your road on collection day
• Eastbourne council tax bands for what the service costs and where the rest of the money goes
• Parking in Eastbourne for tariffs, permits and the free bays