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esmed
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esmed is offline  
Location: Devon, UK
Joined: Oct 2008
Posts: 2,515
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18-08-2009, 09:07 PM

At my wits end with bins and recycling.....

I've just about reached the end of my tether with our ridiculous recycling and bin scheme so wanted to see if others had similar issues.

Basically we live in a mid-terrace house with no rear access so anything that needs to go into the back garden has to go through the house.

Our local council operate a bin system as follows:

Brown Wheelie Bin - Collected fortnightly and used for food waste, garden waste and cardboard

Black Recycling Box - Collected on same week as brown bin and used for tins, bottles, paper, clothing, etc etc

Black Sacks - Any other household waste that can be recycled and is collected on alternate weeks to the above recycling.

Now, as i said we have no rear access so if we were to keep our brown wheelie bin in the garden we would have to wheel it through the house every other week. Fine when it's dry but not ideal when it's wet. Also not ideal when its loaded with maggots because it's got 2 weeks of food waste in it and the weather has been warm causing them to mulitply.

So the only place we have to put our brown wheelie bin is right by our front door which is not pleasant in the warm weather as described above, is off putting to visitors and makes the house stink everytime you open the front door.

There are also a lot of kids that play around our house to there's probably some hygiene aspects going on there as well.

Our black refuge sacks have to go in the back yard as we don't want them out the front of the house for the cats and foxes to rip open so unfortunately those have to come through the house but OH is building a small lean-to type thing to keep them dry and away from cats and Monty!

So anyway a while back i called the council about the above issues and asked for a smaller wheelie bin. Conversation goes like this after me explaining the above:

Me - "Please can we have one of the narrower brown bins?"
Council - "We only do them in one size"
Me - "Thats funny cos our neighbour has a smaller, narrower one"
Council - "She must've bought it elsewhere as we don't do small ones"
Me - "I guess she must've painted the local council details on the front as well then?"
Council - "Ok, we don't do them anymore"

I continue to ask what can be done and get told I can have some green bags to put my recycling in instead and keep them in my backyard. Said green bags are about a strong as my little toe so just split easily.

I'm thinking of ringing the council again this week as i'm really at my wits end with it. I don't want my house to smell of manky bins all the time, i don't want a bin full of maggots and i don't want to wheel a brown bin through my house.

I know they probably won't care but was just interested to see if others had experienced this and whether they'd had any joy with their council in getting it resolved.

Sorry for the long post, it's just really winding me up. I want to do my bit for recycling but not if it's making my house look and smell like the main recycling centre.
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labradork
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Location: West Sussex
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18-08-2009, 09:44 PM
It is ridiculous, isn't it? we have 6 people, 3 dogs and 3 cats in our household and the council will NOT provide us with a second black wheelie bin. Just the one would be perfectly fine if they collected it every week, but they only collect the rubbish once a fortnight. This often means extra trips to the local rubbish dump to get rid of any waste that won't fit into the black wheelie bin, which given it's small size isn't hard.

Like yours, it is often crawling with maggots by the end of the two weeks and it smells sickening. Thank goodness we don't have to drag ours through the house though.

What makes me laugh is, apart from the once a fortnight collection, what on earth do the binmen do? I don't believe that it takes two weeks to sort out the rubbish.
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esmed
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Location: Devon, UK
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18-08-2009, 09:49 PM
Originally Posted by labradork View Post
It is ridiculous, isn't it? we have 6 people, 3 dogs and 3 cats in our household and the council will NOT provide us with a second black wheelie bin. Just the one would be perfectly fine if they collected it every week, but they only collect the rubbish once a fortnight. This often means extra trips to the local rubbish dump to get rid of any waste that won't fit into the black wheelie bin, which given it's small size isn't hard.

Like yours, it is often crawling with maggots by the end of the two weeks and it smells sickening. Thank goodness we don't have to drag ours through the house though.

What makes me laugh is, apart from the once a fortnight collection, what on earth do the binmen do? I don't believe that it takes two weeks to sort out the rubbish.
My sentiments exactly! We know people who've had their recycling box left full because it wasn't sorted properly! They now also refuse to empty wheelie bins if they are too heavy!

As i said, i'm all for a bit of recycling but in a way that it still makes my homelife pleasant rather than having to deal with a stinking bin.

I refuse to drag the bin through the house as i don't want it in my house so we have to make do with it by the front door. We recently moved it a bit further down but won't be long until neighbours complain about it being nearer to their house.
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Louise13
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Location: Nr Edinburgh
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18-08-2009, 09:58 PM
We have a brown bin for garden waste only..its collected every 2nd Thursday..The blue box for newspaper and cardboard and the green box for glass, plastic is emptied every 2nd thursday(the thursdays that the brown bin isn't)

We do have rear garden access but had to lock it due to nippy neighbours thinking they can just come into our garden and leave the gates open..so its locked permanently..and our buckets are left at the side of the front door..
The small bins are used for pensioners in East Lothian..
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Brundog
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18-08-2009, 10:44 PM
We have a brown bin for garden rubbish collected every 2nd Monday,
We have a green wheelie bin for normal household waste collected every friday - however bin men currently striking due to wage issues so we have been waiting 3 weeks for last bin to be emptied so have bags on street now as no room in normal bin.

we also have a red bucket for cardboard and bottles for recycling collected evey other week and a blue bucket for tins and paper every other week.

I keep the bins in the front garden as our kitchen is upstairs so makes no odds where we keep it.

I hardly ever use the coloured recycling buckets as always forget which day and which colour it is so end up chucking it all in the car and taking to local recycling centre.

My beef with our council is I have asked for a new green bin for the last 2 years and am still waiting for it, mine has a big split in it and no lid so foxes get into it all the time
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Lou
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18-08-2009, 11:24 PM
Round here it was a brown thin wheelie bin for our garden rubbish, which in the summer was collected fortnightly, and then in the winter, monthly.

Then every Friday we could put as many black bags out, and they'd take them.

Now we have the thin brown wheelie bin for our household rubbish, which replaces the black bags, a blue wheelie bin for recyling, and a large green wheelie bin for our garden rubbish. The brown household bin gets emptied every Tuesday with altenative blue/green bins.

It was a nightmare when I used to put the black bags out, the big black crows would come and rip them open x
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Phil
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Location: Perthshire
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18-08-2009, 11:40 PM
We're the same.

We've just had our large (normal wheelie bin) collection changed to fortnightly.

Perth & Kinross Council have provided a new full sized large blue wheelie bin though for cans, paper, cardboard, plastic etc so I guess that does remove a lot of the stuff that goes into the normal bin. They've also left the 1/2 size blue 'skinny' wheelie bin we previously had.

We also have a large brown wheelie bin for the garden and food stuff.

For me I think we'll be OK with 'once a fortnight' but that's because they've provided good sized blue options.
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Labman
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19-08-2009, 01:19 AM
I thought only America had the resources to waste through silly recycling schemes. I thought most of Europe was using efficient trash to energy systems.
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Phil
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19-08-2009, 01:56 AM
Originally Posted by Labman View Post
I thought only America had the resources to waste through silly recycling schemes. I thought most of Europe was using efficient trash to energy systems.
We've only (UK) discussed residential

My pal owns a pub and now has to divide 3 times his brown / blue / green bins..........

.........twice as he has a residential (household) and commercial (pub) collection for each.

Bin man refused to empty his bin once so they had a row about what was in each bin.......

he complained and was told "don't worry - watch this" and scoops all six of his into the same truck and tells him that at the moment the whole lot ends up in the same place anyway - the bins are a 'political' experiment and it will be years before they actually do what thay're saying with the waste.
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Rookgeordiegirl
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19-08-2009, 04:59 AM
We have black bin for household collected fortnightly,but to avoid flies etc I keep it in the garage and I keep my food waste etc in a bin liner in one of the freezers till the morning of the collection .alternate tuesdays.
On the other Tuesday we have recycling but no glass bottles, on the Thurs of the week the household is collected the "brown bin" garden refuse is collected.
..............and after all that we still have to take glass bottles ourselves.......and we get charged extra for garden refuse.
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