The bins are for the Dunedin City Council’s separate collection of food scraps and garden waste as part of its revamped rubbish and recycling kerbside pick-up service starting next month.
Some properties received 140-litre wheelie bins for weekly collection of food scraps and garden waste, and others were delivered 23-litre bins for food scraps.
The council acknowledged its allocation would not suit everybody and said it would swap bin sizes for 350 properties in the last two weeks of June.
Tenants would need to discuss the issue with landlords, as the request form for a change in bin size had to be submitted by property owners, the council said.
Asked why the programme made no concession to residents who ran their own composting operations, a spokesman for the council said it had adopted a kerbside collection system suitable for the majority of residential properties involved.
"Offering a bespoke system where individual households can opt out of one or more kerbside services would have added considerable complexity and costs to the services", he said.
The revamped service also includes the introduction of red-lidded council wheelie bins for rubbish, as council rubbish bags will no longer be sold from next month.
Asked if the council was confident the first couple of weeks would run smoothly, the council spokesman said there had been significant staff training and communication with the public.
The service was for more than 52,000 households and "while there may be some hiccups" as it bedded in, the council was looking forward to it starting and "the opportunity to further help people reduce waste to landfill".
