to wish I could dump my rubbish at Edinburgh Council HQ?

[LeftMyRidingCropInTheMortuary]

Second fortnight in a row my street's landfill bins have been left. So 6 weeks since they were last emptied! Even though we trundle the bins half a mile along the road for the convenience of the bin workers. (They are very heavy when full).

And they are redoing all the recycling arrangements so we now have a bewildering array of bins and boxes and colour coded calendars. It's hard enough for me to follow but no wonder the elderly people can't be bothered with it!

I remember the good old days when the bin men would load heavy bins on their backs and whistle cheerfully. Now they are a bunch of pansies with a "computer says no" attitude. Well, I suppose I save the money my mum used to spend on giving them a Christmas gift.

So, instead of piling up my car with stinking rubbish and taking it to the tip, should I dump it at the door of their HQ? They are dreadfully rude on the phone as well!

Particularly grating as I spend £100+ per month and hardly use any council facilities! (Yeah, yeah, I know it's not pay per use).

[britbat23]

Particularly grating as I spend £100+ per month and hardly use any council facilities! (Yeah, yeah, I know it's not pay per use).

Yeah, what use is a fire service anyway. And who cares if YOU don't need social care or child protection?

[LeftMyRidingCropInTheMortuary]

I think I acknowledged that i WBU about that bit in my parenthetical statement, Brit. Although if they are as shit as the binmen then yeah, waste of money.

[Dontyouopenthattrapdoor]

What a weird response. Some people really could start a fight in a cardboard box.

OP YANBU. It is a fairly basic part of our densely populated infrastructure to have our refuse taken away. Why aren't they doing it, do they say?

[StatisticallyChallenged]

Try their online complaints form, that seems to get a better response. We've not long switched to the two wheely bins approach except they delivered one per visible door, ignoring the ones down a side bit. So not enough-combined with them being shared and having idiot neighbours who put landfill in the recycling so it doesn't get emptied...

[LeftMyRidingCropInTheMortuary]

They say it's different crews who don't know the routes. They apparently "can't guarantee" that it won't happen again. They don't give a toss cos we have to pay council tax whatever happens. Such liars as well - removing our normal landfill bins and replacing them with thimble sized ones saying we don't need them anymore because of increased recycling! Why not just say it's to meet their ruddy targets? Edinburgh won't be beautiful any more what with flytipping and rats!

[LeftMyRidingCropInTheMortuary]

We also don't have enough ROOM for all these frigging bins in our communal bin store! So we might end up sharing as well.

[LeftMyRidingCropInTheMortuary]

I was reading their facebook/twitter comments and others have it even worse - eg the binmen leave broken shards of glass on footpath when taking glass recycling.

Why does nothing ever happen with useless councils?

[StatisticallyChallenged]

Ours are on the street as none of us have gardens - historically they all sat together and everyone just shared, worked well. But not everyone's getting territorial. Most of the houses on the street are tiny - kitchens 2m square territory- so most folk don't have enough space to separate rubbish in the house either.

[LeftMyRidingCropInTheMortuary]

Yeah I now have 3 bins in my kitchen! I don't do food waste or that wld be another one. Feel like a mug separating and sorting and rinsing everything before putting in bins. When we all know it ends up in landfill anyway!

The council are obsessed with loads of fashionable PC crap and fancy new initiatives but rubbish (lol) at providing BASIC services for those of us forced to pay their salaries.

[LeftMyRidingCropInTheMortuary]

I'm also fairly sure they get a kick out of making it impossible to drive near the city centre, esp cos council workers are mainly "knit your own muesli-jumper" wearing cyclists.

[Scremersford]

I lived in Edinburgh a few years ago. I got the impression that its local authority was over-powerful but strangely unaccountable. It seemed to be run by either people blinded by Edinburgh architecture who as a result seemed to be so arrogant they thought they could get away with anything and inflict their pet projects on its citizens and a bunch of thugs who had cottoned on to infiltrating the council and extorting money from its citizens. The statutory notices scandal is appalling and potentially far bigger than anything that's come out of Westminster.

I had it on good authority from someone in refuse collection office that bin collections were infiltrated by a high degree of thuggery, often unionised, and that any improvements were incredibly difficult to make, since simply getting the little darlings to carry out their job with any degree of regularity was akin to negotiating a peace plan while balancing on a trip wire suspended across a minefield. We are talking about stuff like unions threatning mass strikes for employees being sacked for viewing child porn on their work computers.

No doubt though someone on here will come on and wax lyrical about how the little darlings are the salt of the earth, doing an incredibly difficult job of such impossibility that no-one in the history of slightly and now mechanised dirty jobs has ever done before. Because they are men. And they are. All men. Very well paid men (especially once you consider the overtime that is necessary to complete their jobs) for what they do.

[LeftMyRidingCropInTheMortuary]

Wow Scremersford! Child porn?!!

[StatisticallyChallenged]

Try living smack in the city centre but needing to own a car. I swear sometimes the one way system changes in the time it takes me to go to the supermarket .

Edinburgh council are goddamn incompetent muppets. They couldn't organise their way out of a paper bag. This is the council who tried to close our local school at the start of a birth rate boom because it didn't have enough catchment kids - because the boundaries were utterly stupid- and are now having to convert every square inch of said school to fit all the kids in...

[Hamiltoes]

Oh how I feel your pain!!

We are in exactly the same situation. We have 1 recyling bin between 4 of us and the other three filled with landfill because they didn't bloody do the changeover on the day they said they would!

I (stupidly?) put a black bag into the bottom of the bin, which takes up 2/3rds of the Size 0 style landfill bin, and the bloody thing got stuck when it was being lifted and so sat their a full 2 weeks, with bin still at 2/3rds of capacity.

Absolute bloody nightmare. And I find a strange amount of cat food packaging in there even though we don't have cats, neighbours are always letting theirs overflow and putting extra in mines, leaving bags at the side of the road overnight which inevitably spill onto the street. Not a pathway or an alley is safe from litter and rubbish, disgusting!

Its all well and good for people who can drive to the tip but what if you can't drive? If everything went smoothly and it was always emptied and no one else used it I would probably manage with the one bin, but then again I'm a single adult with two small kids and we recycle everything we can. Its the one offs i really struggle, birthdays, gatherings, clearouts, new purchases with the inevative poly packaging. Uuuugh.

Sorry, why did you get me started? I detest Edinburgh Council. YANBU

[LeftMyRidingCropInTheMortuary]

I know, I can't sleep cos I am so raging!
They think they are doing us a favour by emptying the bins!
A simple apology would go a long way. Instead it's "fill in this form" (so they can not bother to a) do anything about it or; b) get back to you with a response.

There was a report in the newspaper about a bloke who put up CCTV and caught binmen redhanded just ignoring his bins! Council had accused him of lying and not putting them out in time!

[LeftMyRidingCropInTheMortuary]

Thing is - where do they think all the rubbish ends up that doesn't go in the landfill bin? It doesn't all get recycled! It gets taken to the dump or flytipped! But their graphs won't show that!

This is the sort of thing I'll end up getting arrested for - going nuts one day and exacting my revenge on behalf of all decent, tax-paying residents!

If i didn't have a job to go to, I'd refuse to pay my CT and just take the jail time!

[Collaborate]

In my LA (south of the border) if we get missed out we can go online and then we'll get done first thing the next morning.

I feel for you, OP. I get terribly worked up about the amount we have to throw out each Christmas - it seems that you have it every bloody week.

[PaulAnkaTheDog]

Yanbu. I am complaining almost weekly about one thing or another, yet nothing gets done! Our bins are hardly ever done. We go fortnightly to the dump! Dreading the new system.

[ratspeaker]

Complain to your councillors. We've had similar issues in the past so emailed, one of our 3 ' local' councillors got on it and things improved.

I imagine fly tipping is going to get worse as the council have now done away with commercial vans being allowed into the dump at Seafield.
Btw they have women working at the recycling centre at Seafield.

[PaulAnkaTheDog]

Statistically the school closures were ridiculous. Now almost every council school is bursting at the seams. Common sense could have stopped that problem.

[StatisticallyChallenged]

Yup, all of our local schools are full to bursting and most have been extended but there isn't enough land to extend them any more really. Our catchment school is lovely but on a very limited plot with no grass at all.

[Panickingalot]

Yanbu tell me about it. Some streets here are absolute stinking.

Go on a social media rampage. Twitter. Facebook etc. Contact the evening news for a start. They love a good rubbish bin story.

[weeblueberry]

We're in Edinburgh too and I have to make two trips a week to the bloody tip. We've got two kids in nappies and the waste bin is essentially just full of those after a fortnight!!

They've missed us a couple of times (we're down a dead end and I think they forget us...) and I've told them I'll call environmental health. They generally come out that day when I call (doubt I'm the only one) but I do check the car for scratches afterwards because its a tight squeeze and I suspect they're less accommodating with their van when they have to make an additional stop in their already busy schedule!

[PaulAnkaTheDog]

Statistically it's awful. Even areas where there weren't any closures are affected by it. Completely ridiculous. I thought I read that for Flora Stevenson they were making another building in the playground, that would have to have some form of garden on the roof because it's taking away from playground space!

[MythicalKings]

If our bin men leave a bin by mistake they have to come and collect it at the end of the day if it's reported.