Brentwood Borough Council are encouraging residents to put their bin on a diet this festive season and reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.

Christmas is a time for entertaining friends and family and it can get quite expensive, especially when you buy too much food.

Love Food Hate Waste have lots of ideas and recipes to help you plan for big family dinners or parties as well as ‘cook once and eat twice’ leftover food tips that save you time and money at lovefoodhatewaste.com

Don’t forget that a lot of the Christmas excess can be recycled:

• Orange sacks for plastic bottles, cardboard toy packaging, Christmas card and wrapping paper;

• Red box for glass bottles and glass jars;

• External caddy for food waste.

For collection days over the festive period please refer to your calendar or visit brentwood.gov.uk where you will find the Collection Day Finder in the Recycling section, or sign up to receive SMS text reminders of your recycling collections days or notifications of changes to your refuse/recycling days at brentwood.gov.uk/textservice

A kerb-side collection for Christmas trees on garden waste collection day will be on offer on January 5.

Please note, there is no collection of green waste or Christmas trees between 22 December 2014 and 3rd January 2015.