Wheelie Bins.

[Le Chat]

Our local paper has informed us that we will be getting wheelie bins instead of just bin liners and that the collection will be every other week, rather than weekly. Can any of you ABers who already have this system let me know how it works, and does it work well? One question that I really want to ask is; how many bin liners can you fit in one of these bins?

[Mammar]

What amazes me is - where is the standardisation in all this to keep it simple? Cross a boundary 5 miles up the road and the system changes! Don't try to clear up and recycle when you go on holiday in this country because you'll get it wrong.
Our council, for instance, won't collect glass from your house. It has to be dropped off at designated locations. Do you think all householders bother to make that trip? Of course not, it goes in landfill.
????
One of the best recyclable substances and "they can't handle it"
????
And here's another one for you. We are told not to put any plastic bags in our blue recycling bin so I rang up to explain that I had a copious amount of shredded paper to recycle. If I didn't put it in a plastic bag to hold it all neatly it would no doubt fly all over the place when the bin was being emptied? Also, it would get muddled up with the plastic / cardboard etc in the bin and I was told "Never mind - bung it in loose"
I'm sorry for the rant but had to get it off my chest.
Is there anyone one else out there that feels we are just paying lip-service to this recycling issue?

[shaneystar2]

We are not allowed to put shredded paper in our recyling bin at all ..I did query this with the council who told me "we don't have the plant to deal with it "..Well ....why not ?
This two bin system works ,up to a point but they haven't thought it out very well.For example we have a green and a grey wheelie which are emptied on a rota basis ..one week the green then the grey and so on. Seven miles away in the next county (Suffolk ) they have the same as us ,only they also have a brown wheelie for garden rubbish .
I have a good deal of garden stuff all year round to dispose of and I try to compost but I can only put so much in the composter. We have no car and the nearest tip is ten miles away. If my son wasn't good enough to take it for me I don't know what I would do with it . Well I do .. Pay the bloomin ' council even more to collect it .
Same with the glass ..not accepted in our green bin ..so Mr S has to hike down to the glass thingys at Somerfields ...when he gets there they are full to overflowing most of the time .You can phone the council ad infinitum but they are not interested.
I agree with Mammar...they have to be seen to be doing something ..but we are doing most of it and yet Tescos and all the other big four are still dishing out packaging and plastic as if their lives depended on it .

[Cetti]

We've just moved house and the different bins, bags etc are so damn complicated that I can't cope with them all just yet. If I put the wrong stuff in the wrong bin/bag I will incur a whopping fine, so for the time being my husband takes the whole lot to work and puts it all in an industrial waste bin.

Where we used to live there was a weekly collection of the large black wheelie bin (all household waste) and fortnight collection of the smaller blue wheelie used for paper, cardboard and plastic bottles. I miss that - it was so easy to remember!

[mankymonky]

We have black ones , that are collected every other week Then we have small black ones for recycling and large green ones for garden waste, then we have two brown bins for food waste, these are collected the opposite week. All tins and bottles must be washed out. It works ok if you do it correctly, if you can't be arsed to do everything, your main bin will be overflowing by the second week.

[WokingRay]

We are in the unfortunate position of enduring this system for a year now and it has been a disaster.

We have a blue sack for recycling (except glass!) and black for general household waste. When the temperature in the summer rises to around the 90�F mark the smell is unbearable during the second week and I drive to the local tip using my own petrol and greenhouse emissions to dispose of it � crazy! But what do the unscrupulous do? They can't be bothered to drive to the tip and so dump the black sacks in local woodlands and beauty spots and local politicians call that progress.

This system has been imposed on the UK by Brussels because of our supposedly poor record on recycling but our political elite should have the guts to reject their interference and leave a bloody good system alone; it worked well for years.

And don't believe our vociferous 'Green' minority who bleat on about saving the planet. The majority of 'recycled' waste either ends up in China or a landfill site because it is uneconomic to reprocess it.

[Kacee]

We have a green bin for household waste, a brown one for garden waste, collected on alternate weeks , togther with a green box for glass and tins, collected fortnightly.

What I'd like to know though is how the councils are going to go about fining people if their systems are not adhered to-will they have someone randomly checking the contents then reporting back?

[shaneystar2]

Lol ..Kacee..when they first wheeled (pardon the pun ) out the system in our area our council had a card system put in place like they do at football ..red and yellow cards .The dustmen would religiously check the bins .They came to be known locally as The Wheelie Bin Gestapo ...if you had recycled the wrong things or had not washed your tins etc you got a yellow card. If you persisted in these horrendous misdemeanours you got a red card ...then there were threats of fines .One poor old chap who was over eighty was most confused and had put his minute amount of recycling into a plastic bag before putting it in his green bin ...no more to do the poor old boy got a yellow card because he had bagged it up. Well ...you can imagine the uproar.They have since ditched all this nonsense and as long as the lid is shut the dustmen don't even bother to look .
Mind you with all the bins having a micro chip in them ...who knows !!

[Kacee]

The world's gone quite mad!!

Le Chat-aren't you glad you're joining the rest of us in this madness eh?

Once you are supplied with an array of different bins and boxes, to be collected at different intervals, by different trucks, possibly on different days, you'll be able to spread your rubbish amongst them anyway, so you should have plenty of 'bin space' to last up t o a fortnight-Good Luck!

[NiceCupOfTea]

mushroom 25 - I'm not an authority, either during or out of work. However -

- why would your bin be smaller?
- microchipped??
- loss of the original is a problem in that kids nick them 'for a laugh' so it's getting to the stage that everyone realises you shouldn't have to pay for a new one
- bagging in warm weather - if you actually have a warm weather problem right now I want to know where the hell you're living as I'm bloody freezing.