What the hubs are and what is changing
A bin hub is a fixed on-street cluster of communal bins for general waste, mixed recycling, glass and food, serving the tenement flats around it. Edinburgh rolled them out across the city from 2021 to replace scattered communal bins, and they now serve around 45,000 households.
The complaints came almost immediately: hubs directly under bedroom windows, glass being dropped at three in the morning, smells in summer, fly-tipping beside them and vehicles pulling up to dump. Residents in Marchmont, the New Town and elsewhere campaigned for relocations, and fewer than one in ten review requests initially led to any change.
The 2026 position is that the council has finalised locations for 130 hubs in the World Heritage Site after consultation that began in February 2025. Those locations went into Traffic Regulation Order documents in March 2026. Bull bars, the barriers that stop vehicles hitting the bins, are being fitted to hubs that lack them from autumn 2026, and the main works are expected in mid-2027. Feedback on the locations now goes only through the formal order process.
- Around 45,000 households on communal hubs
- 130 World Heritage Site hubs finalised in March 2026
- Bull bars installed from autumn 2026
- Main relocation works expected mid-2027
- Earlier package: 152 hubs adjusted, 133 moved
- Feedback now only through the formal Traffic Order process
The problem a hub cannot solve
A hub takes bagged waste and recycling. It does not take a mattress, a sofa, a broken wardrobe or a bag of rubble, and that is where Edinburgh's fly-tipping problem lives. The classic Edinburgh dump is a bulky item set down beside a hub by someone who decided that was close enough.
Legally it is not. A hub is council infrastructure on a public road, but waste left beside it is fly-tipping, with a £500 fixed penalty and the possibility of prosecution. The pattern, and why the city produces it, is in fly-tipping in Edinburgh.
The legitimate routes are the council's bulky uplift at £5 an item, a booked slot at a recycling centre, or a registered carrier. Edinburgh's recycling centres are booking-only for everyone, with fixed van windows, as our Edinburgh recycling centres guide explains.
Top floor, no lift, sofa to go?
We come up and bring it down. Quarter load £160 + VAT whatever floor it's on.
Back greens, stairs and factored blocks
Moving a hub off a street does not move the waste that ends up in the back green. Tenement back greens are private land shared between the flats, and when someone dumps a suite there it is the owners' problem to clear, not the council's. The position is set out in fly-tipping on private land.
Stairs are worse, because a stair is a fire escape and anything stored on it is a hazard as well as an eyesore. Factors and owners' associations in Edinburgh increasingly run a standing clearance arrangement rather than paying for emergency call-outs.
Our bin store and backcourt clearance service does that on a schedule, with a photographic record each visit, for factored blocks across the city.
Getting bulky items out of an Edinburgh tenement
The reason people leave things beside hubs is that a top-floor flat with no lift has nowhere to put a sofa and no car to move it. We solve the carrying part: we come up, we bring it down, and it leaves in the same visit. A single item is a quarter load at £160 + VAT whatever floor it is on.
That is our flat and tenement clearance service, and the city page is rubbish removal in Edinburgh. Landlords turning round a flat between tenants, especially around the June and September student changeovers, are covered by landlord clearance.
Old sofas and armchairs are kept separate on the load under the rules on upholstered seating, and everything else is sorted at the transfer station. It is quicker than the council slot, and it is not fly-tipping.
