The backlog of bin waste in Birmingham is "on track" to be cleared this weekend, the council has claimed – despite the ongoing bin strike.
Bin workers "overwhelmingly" rejected an offer from the council to halt the long-running dispute on Monday.
Rubbish has been piling up on the city’s streets and there have been warnings of a public health emergency as hundreds of workers have been on all-out strike for more than a month.
Craig Cooper, strategic director of city operations, said collections would focus first on "the poorest parts" of the city "affected the most" by the ongoing bin strike.
Mr Cooper said the amount of uncollected waste had peaked at 22,000 tonnes, but he expected to be back to "one household collection every week" for all residents by the weekend.
Union 'overwhelmingly' rejects council's offer to end bin strikes
He told the BBC: "We're already back to collecting normal household waste this week," Mr Cooper said.
"We are back into a position of good control."The priority now is street cleansing and making sure the fly-tipping is at a manageable level."
Earlier, the head of the union at the centre of the strikes warned they could spread to other parts of the country.
Sharon Graham, who runs the Unite union, also slammed the Labour government – telling LBC's Nick Ferrari at Breakfast that ministers "don't seem to understand the basics of what's going on here".
Asked how likely it was that the bin strikes, which have gone on for over a month, could spread to other parts of the country, Ms Graham said: "Well, if other councils decide to make low paid workers pay for bad decisions that they did not make, workers paying the price yet again, then absolutely, of course, we all have to take action in those other areas."
She was critical of Labour's inaction in the ongoing dispute between bin workers and Birmingham City Council, saying: "It's taken the government a huge amount of time to get involved in the dispute".
She added: "I've been urging them to do that for weeks and now they are. They don't seem to understand the basics of what's going on here.
"These workers are being asked to lose £8,000 of their pay. That is essentially a quarter of their pay."
The council have argued that workers will not lose any money, but Ms Graham said that it was "untrue".
She said: "Everybody wants to go back to work. Nobody wants to be out on strike, not least these low paid workers.
"But when you've got a situation where workers are faced with losing £8,000 in pay, when they're faced with that, and another set of workers have been told that they may do that too because of bad decisions not made by them but made by this council, I don't know what the government thinks these workers are going to be able to do.
"How are they going to pay their mortgages? How are they going to pay their rent? The government needs to get around the table.
"I'm happy to be there. The leader of the council must be there so that we can deal and finalise this dispute."
LBC callers react to Birmingham bin strike
