Monday 31 August pushes every Kendal collection a day later all week. Garden waste now costs £60 a year, and Canal Head tip opens 8am to 4pm every day.
Kendal sits in the former South Lakeland part of Westmorland and Furness, and that matters more than it sounds. The council still runs three different waste services inherited from Barrow, Eden and South Lakeland. The rules genuinely differ between them, including at bank holidays.
This page covers the South Lakeland rules, which are the ones that apply in Kendal, Windermere, Bowness, Ambleside, Grange-over-Sands, Kirkby Lonsdale, Milnthorpe and Sedbergh.
Checked on 26 August 2026 against the council’s own pages.
Do bins go out on the August bank holiday?
No. In Kendal every collection slips a day.
If your bin is due on Monday 31 August, it will be emptied on Tuesday 1 September. Every other round that week then runs a day later than normal, so a Friday round becomes Saturday. That is the council’s own instruction, published on 25 August 2026.
The same notice says something else worth knowing:
- South Lakeland, which includes Kendal: collections move a day later all week.
- Barrow and Eden: no change at all. Crews work the bank holiday.
One council, one bank holiday, two opposite answers. If a friend in Penrith or Barrow tells you their bins went out as usual, they are right, and it does not apply to you.
Source: Opening hours for Summer Bank Holiday, Westmorland and Furness Council, 25 August 2026.
To check your own street, use the council’s bin collection day lookup. It also exports to a printable list or to a phone calendar.
Which container takes what
Households in Kendal get one grey wheelie bin, two blue boxes and one blue bag. The two boxes are not interchangeable.
- Grey 240 litre wheelie bin. General household waste, emptied every two weeks.
- Blue box one. Paper and card only.
- Blue box two. Glass bottles and jars only.
- Blue bag. Plastic bottles, pots (but not flower pots), tubs and trays, cans, aluminium foil, lids from bottles and jars, and cartons such as Tetra Pak.
- Green 240 litre bin. Garden waste, and only if you have paid (see below).
The council is blunt about mixing the boxes: “We will not collect any boxes that have a mix of card, paper and glass in them.”
Recycling is collected every two weeks. Put everything out by 6am, and no earlier than the evening before.
Things that cannot go in the grey bin at all include vapes, rubble, building waste, bricks, concrete, vehicle batteries, paint cans, oil cans, trade waste and anything hazardous. Ashes are fine, provided you let them cool completely and bag them first.
Sources: types of rubbish and recycling bins and putting your bins out.
Garden waste is no longer free
This is the change that caught most people this year. Garden waste collection became a paid subscription across Westmorland and Furness on 1 April 2026.
- £60 a year per bin. Payable in full at sign-up. No instalments.
- No discount for joining late. Sign up in October and you still pay £60.
- No discount for benefits or Council Tax Reduction. The council says so explicitly.
- First bin free if you are new to the service and do not already have one.
- Extra bins: £25 one-off for the bin, then £60 a year for each of them.
- A maximum of 20 collections over a 40-week season. There are no collections in December, January or February.
- You must use a council bin, with the subscription sticker under the handle.
- 14 days to cancel from the date you paid. No refunds after that.
- It does not auto-renew in March. The council contacts you first.
There was a grace period between 1 April and 28 June 2026 when unsubscribed bins were still emptied. That ended. From 29 June, only bins with a valid sticker are collected.
If you do not subscribe, the alternatives are the tip at Canal Head or a compost heap.
One caution. The council’s own waste harmonisation page still describes the South Lakeland garden waste service as running February to November with “no separate charge”. That describes the old service, not the one running now.
Sources: subscribe to the garden waste collection service and the council’s 30 April 2026 reminder.
At Christmas the collections come early, not late
Bank holidays push Kendal collections later. Christmas does the opposite, and that trips people up every year. Last December, four of the five rounds in the week before Christmas were collected earlier than usual in South Lakeland:
| Normal day | When it was actually collected |
|---|---|
| Monday 22 December | Saturday 20 December |
| Tuesday 23 December | Monday 22 December |
| Wednesday 24 December | Tuesday 23 December |
| Thursday 25 December | Wednesday 24 December |
| Friday 26 December | Saturday 27 December, recycling only |
| Thursday 1 January | Friday 2 January |
Collections went back to normal on Monday 5 January. Note the Boxing Day round: it moved to the Saturday and took recycling only, so general waste waited a fortnight.
The council has not yet published the equivalent dates for Christmas 2026. Expect the same shape and check in mid-December.
Source: changes to bin collections over the festive period, 22 December 2025.
If your bin is missed
Check the council’s bin service updates first. Rounds get pulled for flooding, snow and ice, blocked roads and vehicle breakdowns, all of which happen here.
Before reporting, the council asks you to check that:
- it went out on the right day and was visible from the kerbside
- the lid closed properly, because an overfull bin is left
- the contents were right, and the crew has not left a sticker explaining why
- for garden waste, that the sticker is under the handle and the bin is one of theirs
Then use the South Lakeland form on the report a missed bin page. There are three separate forms and picking the wrong area wastes your time.
The council does not publish a deadline for reporting a missed collection. If you find one, it is not on its website, so report it the same day rather than relying on a window.
The tip: Canal Head, and the two-thirds rule at Grange
Kendal’s Household Waste Recycling Centre is at Canal Head North, Kendal, LA9 7DB. It opens 8am to 4pm, seven days a week, and it is open on every bank holiday except Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day. Site enquiries are on 01539 728 084.
You can use any of the 14 centres in Cumbria wherever you live. The three nearest have very different hours:
- Kendal (Canal Head): 8am to 4pm, Monday to Sunday.
- Ambleside: 8am to 6pm, Monday to Sunday.
- Grange-over-Sands: 8am to 4pm, Thursday to Saturday only.
Grange is the one to plan around. It is shut four days a week.
You need a permit before you arrive if you are driving a van or a utility vehicle, towing a double axle trailer, or walking in on foot. A car with a single axle trailer up to three metres is fine without one. Permit applications are processed Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, and the permit helpline is closed at weekends and on bank holidays, so a Saturday plan needs a Friday phone call on 0300 373 3300.
Some vehicles are refused a permit outright, including Luton vans, any tipper, anything with more than four wheels, and a van towing a trailer.
Two site rules worth knowing:
- Tyres: four per visit, domestic only.
- Asbestos and plasterboard: ring the site first, because capacity is limited.
The centres are run by Biffa with Cumbria Waste Management, and they are for householders. The council lists holiday lets, guesthouses, hotels, Airbnbs and camp sites as trade waste. In a district built on tourism, that catches a lot of people who assume otherwise, and depositing trade waste there can be an offence under section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990.
Sources: Kendal Household Waste Recycling Centre, HWRC visitor rules and applying for a permit.
What a bulky collection costs
Bulky waste in the Kendal area is collected by Right2Work on the council’s behalf. You pay when you book and you cannot choose the day.
- £42 for a single collection of up to three items.
- £11.40 for each item after that, up to a maximum of ten items.
- £121.80 for the full ten.
A three piece suite counts as one item if it matches, and a set of up to eight matching dining chairs also counts as one. A bed and headboard together count as one. Cancellations are only accepted within 24 hours of booking, after which there is no refund. Around two thirds of what is collected is reused or recycled.
The refusal list is long and it is where people get caught. Right2Work will not take carpets, laminate flooring, garden sheds, greenhouses, tyres, window frames, fitted kitchen or bathroom units, glass, gas bottles, bric a brac or fish tanks.
Carpets and rugs are the useful exception: the crew will not collect them, but the tip at Canal Head takes them.
Source: arrange a bulky waste collection in the South Lakeland area.
What changes next
Cabinet agreed a single service for the whole council area on 9 September 2025. For Kendal, the outcome is mostly about recycling.
- The two blue boxes and the blue bag go, replaced by two 180 litre wheelie bins: one for plastic, cans and glass, one for card and paper.
- The grey 240 litre bin stays, and general waste stays fortnightly. There are already 55,000 of those bins in service across South Lakeland, which is why they are not being replaced.
- Bespoke arrangements are promised for properties that cannot take wheelie bins, which matters on Kendal’s yard and terrace streets.
The council will not put a date on it. It delivers 7.5 million collections a year to 117,000 households and says the rollout will take “several months, even years”.
Sources: waste and recycling harmonisation and the council’s decision announcement.
More Kendal local information
Parking in Kendal has current car park tariffs and the permit prices. Kendal council tax bands has the full A to H table for 2026/27. Kendal roadworks and travel tracks closures that can stop a round.
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