Fife's four bins
Fife runs four kerbside bins. The blue bin is landfill waste — the things that cannot be recycled. The grey bin takes paper and cardboard. The green bin takes cans and plastics: bottles, pots, tubs, trays, tins and aerosols. The brown bin takes food and garden waste together.
Two things belong in none of them. Glass is not collected at the kerbside in Fife, and cartons — fruit juice, milk, soup and sauce — do not go in the green bin either, despite looking like exactly the sort of thing that would.
Wash and squash plastics, and leave the lids on bottles. Put recycling in loose rather than bagged: a bagged load is frequently rejected because the sorting line cannot see what is inside.
- Blue — landfill, non-recyclable waste
- Grey — paper and cardboard
- Green — cans and plastics
- Brown — food and garden waste
- Glass — recycling points, not kerbside
- Cartons — not in the green bin
The blue bin catches everyone
This is the single most important thing on this page. In Fife, blue is **landfill**. In Glasgow, North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire, blue is paper and card.
So somebody moving to Dunfermline from Glasgow keeps the same habit and starts putting clean paper and cardboard into the landfill bin every fortnight. Nothing flags it — the bin is emptied normally, and the material is simply lost.
The reverse mistake is worse. Someone moving the other way puts general waste in a paper and card bin, contaminating a recycling load. We have written up why Scotland ended up like this in why bin colours are different in every Scottish council.
Blue bin full, and it's the wrong bin anyway?
We take the things no Fife bin is built for — furniture, appliances, whole rooms — sorted and over 80% diverted.
Glass: the other Fife difference
Most Scottish councils now collect glass at the kerbside in some form — Glasgow has a purple bin on an eight-week cycle, the Lanarkshires take it in their mixed recycling bins. Fife does not.
Glass bottles and jars in Fife go to a recycling point or a recycling centre. There are recycling points across the region, and our Fife recycling centres guide covers the staffed sites, what they take and the van rules.
As everywhere, only bottles and jars count as glass recycling. Drinking glasses, Pyrex, window glass and ceramics melt at different temperatures and contaminate the batch — they are landfill waste. Broken glass is landfill too, wrapped for safety.
Food and garden together
Fife's brown bin takes food and garden waste in the same container, which is more generous than several councils where food needs its own caddy.
It is also the bin where contamination does most damage, because the material goes to composting and anaerobic digestion (breaking food down without air to make gas and fertiliser). Glass, foil, plastic pots, plastic bags and food still in its packaging all ruin the process. Food waste has to come out of its wrapper before it goes in.
That includes compostable and biodegradable packaging unless the council specifically says otherwise — most composting facilities run faster cycles than those bags need to break down.
When your bins are collected
Fife Council publishes a bin calendar by address, and that is the only reliable source. Days vary street by street, change after route reviews, and shift around public holidays.
We deliberately do not print a calendar here. A guide that gives you the wrong day is worse than one that tells you where to look.
When no bin is the answer
Bins are built for a household's weekly output. They are not built for a house clearance, a mattress, a three-piece suite or a garage emptied after fifteen years — and leaving those beside a bin is fly-tipping rather than recycling, with real consequences set out in what happens if you're caught fly-tipping.
We cover the whole of Fife — Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy, Glenrothes, St Andrews, Cupar, Leven and the East Neuk — with no permit, no booking and no carrying on your part. See rubbish removal in Dunfermline or house clearance.
