Wheelie Bins.............again

[Richard]

My main concern about the wheelie bins is the eyesore on the environment.

Gone are the rows of houses with the neat little front gardens. Now the gardens have gone to make room for the second car and each house has two or three grubby bins parked outside, most of which have sailed a few feet down the pavement from the wind the night before.

Something really has to be done.

[secret squirrel]

I agree with that Richard. It think one problem is finding a place to store the blasted things.If we put ours at the front we have to walk all the way though the house with the rubbish, or if its at the back, we have to lean over the fence risking a hernia.
Also there are little piles of stuff all round the kitchen waiting to be taken out all in one go.
Do you all pay for your bins? We do and they arent cheap either. I diligently put all the stuff in the correct bins but there seems to be `so` much of it no matter how hard I try, to buy things with as little packaging as possible.
And of course in the summer there are so many flies, it makes sitting in the garden, not so pleasant . The house is always full of flies too.
lorna

[Casnz10]

Where we live we have alternate weeks for collecting rubbish/ recycling, as my recycling bin was full after a week I asked for another one and my council refused but offered a 2nd grey rubbish bin, I did tell them it was the recycling I was struggling with (wine bottles and lager cans take up so much room ) but they wouldn't give me an extra recycle bin. I think that's disgraceful.

[Mad Chick]

We have a black wheelie bin for rubbish that is collected every week. Our recycling is collected fortnightly - a green box for paper/card, another green box for glass, a green sack for plastic/metal and a green wheelie bin for garden waste. It's a shame that we can't put other compostibles in the green bin - only garden waste allowed so no veg peelings (how come I can't put potato peelings in there but I can dig up a potato plant complete with potatoes from the garden and put that in?), no straw from the chooks etc. As I'm not really a gardener our green bin is normally empty apart from grass cuttings in the summer.
It's a shame about the green bin but on the whole I think our recycling scheme is excellent. The boxes stack neatly down our side passage, we just throw everything in the top box as and when we need to and get the kids to sort it all the night before collection

[Willow]

We have:
1 wheelie bin for garden waste and paper/ card emptied fourtnightly
1 recycling box for plastics collected weekly
1 recycling box for glass & tins collected weekly
1 small lidded bin for food waste (which has to be bagged in supplied biodegradable bags.) collected weekly
1 wheelie bin for stuff that wont go in any of the others - emptied fourtnightly

[secret squirrel]

We are asked to wash bottles and tins before putting them in the bin, so they either get put in the dishwasher or if there is no space, they get rinsed under the tap. Yoghurt puts are not allowed in the recycling bin but other plastic containers `are`. The biggest bin is the one for general rubbish, of which there is very little and the recycling bin is the smaller of the two. If I asked for a second bin, they would sell it to me and not provide it free of charge.
When we first had wheelie bins we were given the option of having one or not, but we chose to buy one anyway because the foxes used to open the bin bags all over the street. Eventually everyone was `given` a bin free of charge, including us and then we were told we were not allowed to have 2 bins even though we had paid for the first one. Then one day the second bin was `stolen` back by the council, who claimed it was damaged on the lorry. £37 down the drain.
I simply dont understand why some plastics are recyclable and some are not and how do you define which is which?
They should give everyone a double sized recycling bin if they are only going to collect it every other week, because there is just so much of it.
I feel that by saying you cant put stuff in black bags and then put them in the bin, opens the way for the council to snoop and identify what is in each bin. And............why do they insist on it being only 3 inches from the curb or they wont take it, and then leave the bin in the middle of the pavement .If you are not there to move it, anyone who goes past has to walk round it and then moan about it as if its our fault.
lorna

[manda]

http://environment.about.com/od/earthta ... astics.htm

Gives an overview of what the numbers mean...hope that helps.

[Steve the Gas]

Food waste....... I use the 12 recyclers I'm looking at right now....

[secret squirrel]

Very useful information Manda.
So who exactly works in re-cycling centers, what are they paid to do? What are we paying our council tax for? I see now, absolutely nothing , as we are expected to get our heads round what professionals dream up.
As a fairly intelligent person, myself, if I dont `get` it, how does your average jo public cope,? but then maybe they can understand it better in some ways.
Didnt realise there were so many different kinds of plastic. Well, I did, but if we are all doing our job to re-cycle because we care about the environment, we shouldnt be penalised when we dont get it quite right, because its `so` complicated.
Am I right in assuming that the plastics which are `the` least biodegradable are the ones which go into land fill anyway?, which rather defeats the object of the exercise.
lorna

[Richard]

Back to the blight on the landscape tune, I was speaking to my daughter about this yesterday and she said that one of the hardest parts of her Estate Agents job is moving all the wheelie bins away to get a decent photograph of a property.

You get so many Environmental friendly Waste Disposal ideas on the Dragons Den, wish they would design something a bit more attractive and in tune with the surroundings.

Richard

[Knikitta]

We have 1 black wheelie bin for general household waste which is collected weekly as long as the lorry can get down our road (cul-de-sac with cars both sides of the road), and 1 brown wheelie bin for recycling collected once a fortnight, again, if the lorry can get down.

If they can't get down the road on collection day because of .... teachers parking on our street badly meaning the lorry can not get down, then they sometimes try the next day. Other wise we have to wait a week.

We are not allowed green wheelie bins because of lack of council funding, though the next street all have green bins (garden waste) and they are rarely full on collection day. So frustrating.

If we put extra bags out with the bins, they leave them and put massive stickers on them containing warnings of fines etc for leaving rubbish on the pavement. *sigh*

[Mrs B]

Now I feel really lucky as we have fortnightly collections but the best bit is that all our recycling including plastic and alluminion goes into a blue wheely bin. So with the waste bin and compost bin that gives us 3 bins and a strong bag for paper. Our bin men are pretty good at taking extra recycling, I had a huge plastic shelf once that wouldn't fit in the bin but they took it anyway, same with garden waste such as Christmas trees.

We generally get a couple of charity bags through the door a month so all clothing and resaleable items go in there.

Saves having lids blowing around and boxes falling over, I can see how 3 wheely bins would be a storage problem for smaller houses though.

[Penguin]

I do get quite cross sometimes with the council. They have now started to charge us for collecting our garden rubbish, won't allow us to have more than one bin for ordinary rubbish and don't collect certain plastics. It's got a triangle on it; that means it can be recycled - I know that different numbers mean different things, but if it can be recycled then it really should be. Many years ago, when I lived in Milton Keynes, recycling was collected in a pink sack and that included yoghurt pots and butter cartons; where I live now they tell me that it's the wrong kind of plastic . Do people not want us to have a decent environment to live in in the future? Surely recycling what you can would be the answer?

Now that's I've had my weekend rant I'm off to check on the chickens. They agree with recycling, especially old pasta, cheese, grapes and cabbage ....

[ChrisG]

Cant believe you have to pay to take your rubbish to the tip How on earth are you supposed to get rid of stuff??

Here, everyone in our village has been supplied with:
a black bin for general rubbish, emptied weekly;
a green bin for garden waste, emptied monthly;
a black box for paper and glass, emptied fortnightly;
and a green box for goodness knows what - BECAUSE WE DONT HAVE ONE

In fact, we dont have a green box or a green bin either and as I have 3/4 acre of grass here, it's laughable that they think I could possibly put all the grass clippings in it for a whole month! Doesnt matter how many times I call them, they never let us have the additional bins. Good thing we are into recycling and have a free dump to take it to.

Funny thing though, when they first started getting us to put all our paper and glass into the box instead of the bin, there followed an article in the local paper telling us the council was being fined because it was dumping all our recyclable stuff in landfill What, might I ask, was the purpose of us sorting it all out for them

[Steve the Gas]

Get our Al on the case..