In Hart, they consider this 'pollution', say they then trash your recycling with the normal waste, and to deal with this they are consiering implementing a three-strike system. First strike: a warning; second strike: a four-figure fine; third strike: they cease collecting from your property permanently.

Sadly, they aren't putting the same amount of energy into recycling. Rather than figuring out how to recycle soft plastics, they instead regularly leaflet us and tell us not to buy items with lots of plastic packaging. Gee, thanks.

Our collection is also a switcheroo one, with a black garbage bin one week and a blue recycling one the next. We get a green tray for glass (which the council finally caved in and started dealing with a year ago), and you can optionally buy stupidly small 'garden waste' bags that the council then don't bother collecting most of the time.

@Riles: I'm happy to recycle—I just hate the council's 'warnings' that if, say, some arsehole walks past your bin and plonks something in it that shouldn't be there, they'll fine you a grand.

They're still planning on charging by weight here. Amusingly, the council argues that it's the homeowner's responsibility to ensure their bins are protected, don't have the wrong things in, and aren't accessible by anyone other than said homeowner.

Well, therein lies the flaw. The council is quite literally expecting you to know when the refuse truck is going to show up, drag your bin out an hour or so before, watch it (to make sure no-one puts anything 'bad' in it), wait for the refuse to be taken, and then put it out of sight until next time.

We had a note through the door saying that the official CCBC 'recycling warden' had been snooping around during the collections two weeks ago and had noted we weren't recycling enough.

This could be because the previous (shite) recycling bin was so tiny it had been nicked ages ago and I'd been forced to haul all my bottles and cans to the fucking recycling centre at Asda because you shiftless cunts couldn't be bothered replacing it nor introducing a proper recycling scheme until now. You cunts.

While I appreciate families will fill their bins quicker than a couple with no children, this sends the wrong message. We should be encouraging people to recycle more and throw away less, not 'resolve' the issue by more bin collections.

When I lived in Cherwell, I wrote to the council asking why they didn't recyle glass from the recycing bins. The answer was that due to the amounts of bottle banks and the like, it's more cost effective for them to use them, then collect it. In Bingley, the bins are collected once a week (and I mysteriously seem to have two bins with my address on, whihc is an increase of one since we first moved here), but even then I suspect we'll struggle to fill it in that time. The recying is done through an insert in the bin, which we don't have, so everyhting is going to landfill until we get that sorted. Sorry, Great Yarmouth.

This 'do the bins every week' idea is nonsense in its purest form. It's perfectly fine to do them fortnightly, alternating with recycling, and I cannot fathoma t all why it is being done, save for an attempt to 'bring back the good old days' where I suppose coppers would give yo a clip around the ear and tell you off rather than ASBO you and so on.

The problem isn't paper rubbish and such though, is it? It's food waste. Even if you've only used a quarter of your bin, if you've got a chicken carcass in there for two weeks and it's summer, it's going to reek.

I'm currently absolutely astounded that Eric Pickles has described weekly bin collections as a "basic right" which really, really does shit upon things like slavery, life and property. He's not a fat thicky, he's a fat thicky cunt now in my book.

They're not, they're privileges.

I'm fairly confident that ensuring the population are not fed upon by rats, maggots and foxes is one of the basic things a government should be sorting. It's not about human rights it's about an elected government making sure all the utilities work. Councils can go to hell, bring in a law stating that it has to be weekly, you are the government, grow some balls.

We would like your views on proposed changes to your bin collections.

Wirral has a target of recycling 50% of its household waste by 2020. We are currently recycling around 36%. To achieve our target we need to be recycling at least 16,000 tonnes more waste every year. We can't meet this target if we continue with our current scheme.

We are asking you to consider two different options for the collection of your green general waste bin and give us your comments or suggestions.

What’s changing?

Time for a greener system! A third of your waste could be recycled through a food recycling collection.

Like many other councils we will be introducing a separate weekly food recycling collection from spring 2017.

Introducing a separate food recycling collection will mean changes to your green bin collections as there will be less waste to collect in the green bin.

Find out more about the changes and how they will affect you

Heard from a few different people now that pretty much all the waste that we carefully sort round here goes to the recycling centre, gets dumped in a massive pile and then shovelled up into a different truck and sent straight to landfill. The way they get the figures for recycling has nothing really at all to do with the amount of waste that is eventually recycled. The whole thing is a joke. They built a massive waste recycling plant which cost I think something in the region of £100 million but it's now been mothballed because it's not economically viable to operate.