Be Excellent To Each Other

Woo, I'm in the bin thread!
We have a grey general waste bin,collected once fortnightly.
A blue recycling bin, collected on the alternating weeks also fortnightly.
A brown garden waste bin, collected when I notice the neighbours have put theirs out.
A black glass box, collected once monthly with the blue bin.
The first three are tall plastic wheely bins which I couldn't see any animals getting in and which if they smell, its only when you open them. No smell escapes otherwise.
The glass box is also plastic with a lid.
I would be pretty outraged if I found out so much money was being spent on increasing collections again, is this just an English thing? I'd imagine so, as we have had our council tax frozen for a couple of years!
I take Craigs point that the problem is missing collections, but what was the root cause of that? Isurely that should be resolved before increasing the scheduled collections.
When people are being made redundant from public service roles, students are paying high fees and budgets are being cut left right and centre this seems an extraordinary waste of money.

I just throw all mine through the door behind which the thing in the basement lurks. Of course, if I've mainly been eating out that week I sometimes have to shove a hapless visitor down those stairs.

IMPORTANT BIN NEWS FROM THE WIRRAL



So, it's either smaller general waste bins, or tri-weekly collections.

Let's have a referendum!

In Newcastle-under-Lyme, we've gone from this in 2011 (apologies for the Daily Mail link) to this a few weeks back. Progress!

Also, they changed the day of collection round here too, but pushed a leaflet through telling us about it on the day of the new collection.. after they'd been.

I think the weekly food collection sounds ace. It's really only food waste that smells, so collecting that often would be great. Cardboard, etc doesn't present so much of a problem. I'd definitely go for that option.

Russell, we need to get a waste disposal unit fitted when we get the new place. I miss our old one terribly.

They've put signs on the side of bin kitties here saying they are moving to fortnight my collections. I thought they'd been fortnightly for years, but them when I think about it I do see people put their bins out on the street EVERY Wednesday.

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.

I hope to goodness that isn't true as it is not only a waste of everyone's time, but also resource and careless to the environment.

In better news, did you see that carrier bag use has dropped by about 85% since they introduced the charge?

@Davpaz is a third of your weekly rubbish really food waste? I'm pretty sure mine isn't.

The local council here tried to go to fortnightly bin collections recently but it was thrown out by the councillors as they stated that the council needs to come up with better ways to save money, not just go straight for the easy win of reducing the bin collections.

I've heard much the same about every office, estate, council that I have lived or worked in. I'm sure they can't all be doing it, can they? Maybe it is some sort of urban myth. It'd have to be either illegal or at least a terrible PR disaster if something were to be proven to be dodgy. Are there many councils or companies to have been busted for this?

It's once a week here, which is good as the wheelie bin is often full or near to full by the end of the week, which is probably a damning indication of how much rubbish we create.

There is also no plastic bag tax here, so we can still fill our boots in that regard. We use them as free waste bin liners for the house. (The small round ones in the bathroom/lounge, not the main one in the kitchen.)

I reckon a big chunk of our general rubbish is food waste, if I'm honest. Food waste, tea bags, non-recyclable packaging (cling film, crisp packets and the like) and so much kitchen roll (spillage is a big thing in Chez Paz )

We're not the most dilligent family on recycling though. For example, practically anything that goes in the bathroom bin ends up in the general waste. That includes a lot of plastic bottles and loo-roll tubes. Naughty!

I know it sounds like something that people say because they just want to moan about anything to do with being environmentally friendly but I'm pretty sure it's largely true.

A combination of low oil prices and the government scrapping some penalties for landfill means it's not worth the bother.

Here's the story on the fuck off massive plant down the road from here getting shut down:

http://www.lep.co.uk/news/scrapped-the- ... -1-7741123

We still have to sort all our crap but according to some of the few people still working there it gets taken straight off the recycling trucks and off to landfill.

Over to our "spluttering outrage at the imagined or real excesses of the public sector" correspondent, Captain Caveman.

Same for me. I just can't be bothered to go all the way to the garage and put them in the recycling.

My Dad told me he has watched the bin men shove 2 sorts of bin (paper+Plastic and Garden waste) into the same lorry for years

I've had fortnightly collections for years. my wife is from Ireland and recycling has been the norm there for a lot longer so she has always made sure we do it. So I do the following.

General waste in Green bin, some food waste and all veg peelings etc go in my 2 compost bins in the garden

Some plastic (defined by council) and paper go in blue bin

Garden waste goes into brown bins. These used to be a one off £35 charge but council started charging £30 a year once the government stopped them putting up council tax every year. Need them as I have quite a big garden and the 2 I have are full most collections throughout the year.

Council doesn't do anything for bottles\glass, there are lots of banks in supermarkets car parks so we have a plastic dustbin that we fill and empty in one of the banks.

Don't really find we have issues with the green bin getting too full by the time collection day comes around as I think the recycling we do helps. Only issue I have is when its hot as I find maggots are in there. So I have to lift the main drain manhole on the drive and hose the bin out a few times.

Yeah, but don't some lorries have different compartments on the left and right?

By god, people - it's Wednesday!

Wednesday is bin day around here.

What's the worst type of bin?

Osama Bin Laden.

Actually, no, it's s pedal bin where the lid only opens about an inch, despite you stamping on it.

That's how the one that does ours works.

Now imagine asfish's dad frothing himself up into a rage for nothing.

Doesn't mean they don't empty them in the same place, of course.

Get fucked.

Back to you in the studio.

Exciting bin front page news!

Crikey. Not good. Bradford moving to fortnightly collections soon. Boo!

I think everywhere here went fortnightly this week. BUT I have seen that everyone has rechecked a bigger bin.

Big bung!

We have fortnightly, a few years ago after Christmas I was driving to work and noticed a house in my street with 2 green (general waste) bins out for collection.

So I rang the council and asked what the criteria was to have 2. Got a lot of waffle, before I firmly asked them how I could get a 2nd green bin if I wanted one.

They said I had to pay £70 a year for it, so not really that expensive to double your volume and sort of go back to weekly.

I never did get a 2nd one as we manage. I think at the time we hosted most of the family for the holiday so the bins were bursting.

Here in my part of Madchester, we still have 4 wheely bins. Brown for bottles (I'm assuming that the counsil official who made this decision is a Viz reader), metal and recyclable plastic, blue for paper and cardboard, green for food and garden waste, and grey for non-recyclable stuff. The green has always been one of the large ones, the blue and brown were small, but we recently requested large ones as we regularly fill both of them, and they were supplied free of charge ...... But they didn't take the old ones away. We have a calendar which tells us how often and when each of the bins will be emptied. Green is emptied every week during the summer, and fortnightly at other times. All the others are emptied fortnightly.

We've managed very well with this for years, but recently we've been informed that the large, non-recyclable bins are being replaced with small ones, but will still only be emptied fortnightly. The council reckons it will save millions of pounds by doing this. So we've been issued with a new smaller grey bin [b]with our address on a plastic label stuck to it[/] (good) and the old ones have been taken away (bad). So, they spent a huge amount to give us all new small bins that we'll probably fill completely each week and removed perfectly good larger bins that they were only emptying fortnightly anyway. Doesn't make sense to me.

I keep our wheely bins by some conifers in the front garden.

A possum has taken up residence in the trees and this creates a few annoyances for me:

1 - The possum poos drop on the lids of the bins
2 - The possum drives the dogs mental and they spend all evening barking at it
3 - The Boy wakes up at night and thinks there is a possum in his bedroom
4 - The possum makes funny hissing noises and scared the stuffing out of me one night when I shone a torch outside and the light reflected from its big beady eyes

I got home from a walk today and noticed that my brown garden waste bin was still half full after the collection.

It was odd as there were still hedge cuttings in there, but I had put these on top of the bin this morning and it was already 80% full.

So called the Council and the women on customer services struggled to hide her delight at the chance to bash the bin company and said they would call me back.

So get a call and I was explaining to the bin company lady what had happened, in the conversation I mentioned I had put some bamboo in the bin the week before.

She then told me that I can't put bamboo in my garden waste bin. I say sorry I won't do it again (I will but it will be at the bottom of the bin )

Then I'm told that they won't come back as I put the wrong thing in the bin. I tell her that the binmen have taken the bamboo and left hedge trimmings in the bin, but she is having none of it. So I say ok as I really don't care that much given I have 2 of these bins.

Around 10 minutes later I'm at the front of the house reading an email from the council, confirming that I've committed a garden waste infraction and that if I want my bin emptying before the next scheduled collection there will be a fee.

Next thing back comes the bin lorry and empties my bin !

Just love Council incompetence

Garden Waste infraction! Splendid.

They'll be sending Robocop round next. Seriously though, bamboo? Why can't you put that in there and where does it say that anywhere?

Bamboo is too fucking strong, and tends to fuck up mulching machines.

In my defence it was very thin stuff from the top of a bigger cane I harvested.

Our local recycling contract has changed hands. My friend is a really keen recycler and has all of the literature ever distributed about which kinds of plastic, etc etc.

Anyway, she put out her recycling as normal and it wasn't collected. Just a notice pasted to her bin saying that there were non recyclables inside.

After a lengthy call to the council it turned out to be due to there being black plastic food containers inside, which the old company recycled but the new one does not. By this wasn't told to *anyone*. Can you imagine the number of people that would have had those?

They are recyclable, but not cost effective to do so. Apparently they make meat look redder, but the cameras on the recycling machine find it hard to identify them.

Anyway, she was told she'd have to pay to have collections reinstated. She made quite the fuss and got this changed.

I think I'd give up on recycling if my council was like that.

People seem strangely convinced that it's Thursday.

When it's actually it's three-days-after-bin-day.

Aha! BINS!
Now we're talking. Is Pundy around?

We got some bloody great sticker on our bin the other day, something along the lines of THERE WAS FOOD WASTE IN YOUR BIN; YOU ARE THEREFORE WORSE THAN HITLER. DO IT AGAIN AND YOU WILL BE EUTHANISED

... I mean, really - food waste in a bin? Whatever next? How very outrageous I'm sure! (I gather we're supposed to be keeping some minging brown plastic slops bucket in the kitchen - yeah, that's really going to happen. Oh no)

Hopefully they'll find some other shite to get aerated about and this is just some initiative/phase. Me? I wish they'd get on top of stuff that actually matters, e.g. fly tipping twats dumping tonnes of shite in the beautiful countryside round here, instead of getting in a fucking tizz because traces of 4-day old Madeira cake were detected in a black wheelie bin.

My brother has a slop bucket and he was trying to tell me it was a good idea the other day. I was having none of it.

The small environmental savings that are made are surely destroyed by the massive truck that drives slowly round the street picking them up.

Very likely, plus it's a minging, stinking hygiene hazard, both inside and out, especially with inquisitive cats/dogs/foxes/rats. Who wants a filthy repository of rotting food and liquids in their kitchen?

Not Mrs C, that's for sure. The Council are unwittingly taking on a formidable foe.

Just heat it up.

Soup!

If it's likethe Vale Royal one, it's an airtight mini-bin. Quite smart actually. My mother in law keeps hers outside

Bamboo is, and I won't apologise for my French given the problem the previous owners have left us with, a cunt.

Our Council have not tried that one yet, that said they are all different, the next council over to me still does weekly "throw all you shit in one bin collections"

Simply introduce some pandas and let nature take its course.

Whats the problem?


With mine, I make sure I cut it back and keep on top of it. I have a 2 lots, I'm sort of farming one patch and getting really good canes