Rubbish collection

[kerrie phillips]

just gone back and rerad posts again i see some of you have boxes ? all ours are wheelie bins.

[Paul Morgan]

Down yer in South Zummerzet we have bi-weekly rubbish collections which seems to work OK. I can see it might be an issue in blocks of flats etc, but there are not too many of them to be honest.

The major problem we have is with our councils stupid attitude to everything else.

1.0 Garden waste - you have to PURCHASE a green wheely bin from them and then PAY extra for it to be emptied every other week or so.

2.0 Re-cycleables are a complete mystery. We have been provided with a box, just about bigh enough to fit an average pair of shoes in, to deal with the rest. Thet WILL NOT take ANY plastics at all.....and the rest has to be perfectly washed or they just leave it.

This brings about the perverse situation where folks don't bother with the roadside collections and drive to the re-cycling centre individually in an effort to be green.

Why they didn't provide another wheely bin for all the recycleables I don't know.

As usual the Lib Dem lead numpties down here have come up with half a solution which simply adds to the problem.

Other than that it's great....

[Karl R]

Ok...we have

240 litre grey wheelie for food and non recyclable waste
240 litre green wheelie for garden rubbish
20 litre blue box for glass, plastic and cans
Small blue bag for newspaper/junk mail/catalogues
Cardboard can be left out if it is cut into cereal packet sized pieces and tied up

All are on fortnightly collections.

The downsides are:

Grey wheelie bin in this weather stinks like hell and is full of maggots by the time it is emptied - costing me a small fortune in Jeyes, nor is it big enough for 2 weeks worth of waste for a family of four.
Blue box is dramatically too small so most of the recyclables now go into a large unopened bin bag - fine unless it's windy and then you have plastic bottles flying all over the street.
Blue bag is useless so again it all goes into a bin bag and is taken to the tip once a month
Takes far too long to cut up the cardboard, so it is stored behind the shed and tipped once a month into the cardboard skip at the tip.

The upsides are:

None

What does our hallowed council leader say about the grey bins??? You won't get smells or flies if it is kept shut - he should have been here last week when it smelt of decomposing flesh and was a writhing sea of maggots, and that's with the lid shut.

Also our grey bin is chipped, ready for when they start charging by weight.

Because of the way in which the town where I live was developed, some areas can't have wheelie bins so they still have grey bin bags that hold the same amount of waste as the wheelie bin. These areas get their rubbish collected weekly still. The council won't/can't see that these areas have double the amount of waste collected on a fortnightly basis than I do. Why do I pay Council Tax?????

[John Smith]

The situation where I live (in Bexley - London's best borough for recycling, or so they keep on telling us) is:

- a green box for paper/cardboard. No limits appear to be set, they'll collect outsize folded cardboard too if it's stacked by the green box. Collected fortnightly.
- a maroon box for metal cans and plastic bottles (but no other metal or plastic packaging is allowed). Collected fortnightly on the weeks when the green box isn't.
- a black box for glass bottles. Collected with the maroon box.
- a brown wheelie-bin for garden and kitchen waste. All foodstuffs and compostibles go in here. Collected weekly.

And then we have the "regular general waste". To be honest, I don't have much of that, as most things go for recycling. Some households have a green wheeliebin for this, but that's charged for by the council, so I still use a black bag. There's nothing in it to smell, so animals don't rip it open. That's collected weekly, but I often only put it out when I've filled a bag - which can be every other week.

So no real complaints from me here... maybe Bexley ARE really as good as they say!!

[Andrew MacLean]

Our rubbish collection is rubbish in more ways than one. We live at the end of a narrow lane so the big trucks that empty wheelie bins can't get to us. We are given black plastic bin-bags for ordinary waste and blue bin-bags for recycling waste. They are collected alternate weeks.

There are a number of foxes in our area who like opening bin-bags to see if there is anything inside that they can eat. They do not sort through the contents and re-pack the bag when they finish.

This means that, once our bin is full (it holds one bin bag) we have to keep the rest inside the house waiting for the two week collection. This has to be the worst idea ever to come out of local government!