Why do bin vans flash and shout so obnoxiously?

There’s no guarantee of that week in week out though and it’s far better for it to be automatic then at someone’s judgement re time to start it and it being forgotten etc

It's to rudely awaken you. On other days you can get up when you want.

I suggest having a cup of tea, putting your trousers on and thinking about leaving the house.

I am shocked and appalled that no one else has said this, four pages in. What is the world coming to?

Then where you grew up was clearly heavily influenced by American English.
My Grandparents, who would be all well into their 100s if they were still alive today (so I’m guessing much older than you) and who all came from different counties, called them dustbin lorries -because they emptied dustbins into them. Over the years we shortened “dustbin” to “bin”, so we mostly call them “bin lorries” now

And it's not SHOUTING there's no point it being a whisper is it.

The vehicle announces it is reversing every time it is reversing. The driver doesn't put it on when he or she thinks there might be a person behind them.

I expect you would want church bells and cockerels silenced if you moved to the country.
Some people refuse to understand that someactions are for the benefit of society, not there to make their lives difficult.

Oh for gods sake learn what a joke is.

Don’t really see the issue. If they wake you up, they soon pass, and then you go back to sleep.

No one’s suggesting otherwise, just that it’s a euphemism, not a regionalism.

What went in the dustbin after sweeping the floors or when the dustbag of a vacuum cleaner was emptied?

Food waste went to dogs, chickens, rabbits or pigs (latter in a swill bucket). Rags, metal and suchlike went to the rag n bone man. No vast amounts of plastic packaging, no bin bags, no clinker from the hearth, no cat litter, no nappies. It would have been largely broken glass/other broken things, paper, card. And dust. Lots of it.

Dust wasn't a euphemism for anything.

https://news.stv.tv/east-central/bin-lorry-which-killed-alloa-pedestrian-had-extensive-blind-spots-fatal-accident-inquiry-hears

I know it doesn't.

Yes, but in the same way that in Victorian times ‘night soil man’ was the euphemism for the workers who came around to remove the human excrement from pit lay rinse and cesspits.

It wasn’t ‘soil’ they were taking away, it was faecal sludge. Just like the dust cart doesn’t collect ‘dust’.

And I assume the dust part comes from the word dustbins.

A child near where I live was also killed by one recently.

You want the vans to crush rubbish in total silence now?

My FIL was a bin man in the days before wheelie bins, where they were picking up a metal bin, taking off the lid, tipping it manually into the crusher and replacing it by a gate, with lid— now that was a brutal job, and in his late eighties he has all the lingering health issues you’d imagine.

Well, I know what it does 🤣 I was brought up in Hertfordshire, was always called a dustcart.

Never ever heard it called a dustcart, and I’m not young, and have lived in a number of different UK regions.

always been the bin lorry. It’s a lorry what deals with bins, it doesn’t collect dust.

Probably because the complaints from people not getting their bins emptied because there isn’t time to do everyones if they don’t start til 9.30 outnumbers the complaints from people held up for a couple of minutes on the school run.

why don’t you get together with the neighbours and offer to take your bins to the waste facility yourself when it’s more convenient to you?

Because getting rudely awakened by the dustman is a British tradition (cf Blur).

What a rubbish council

Our bin men collect general household waste every other Friday (alternating with recycling) at 7.20 - 7.30 on the dot. They're very prompt and only really severe weather or staff shortages knock them off their routine.

At this time of the year in my corner of north east England, it's still very murky at that hour, even when the weather's clear and the dust-carts need all the alerts and flashing lights they can get. Households are waking up, people are getting in their cars, delivery vans are arriving, postie is enroute and there are far more vehicles around than the narrow terraces (circa 1890s) in our neighbourhood were built for. The original planners would have had horses and carts in mind, not tons of metal and internal combustion engines, so the terrain is a lot more dangerous than it looks. I don't mind the noise, it's not particularly disruptive - we're up at that time anyway - and it lets us know the bin men are about and we'll be able to retrieve our wheelie bin from the back alley by the time we're dressed.

Round here, the binmen. Stupid fucking idiots who can't wait 2 minutes for the bin lorry to move drive up and along the pavement. One bin man was recently hospitalised after being run over by a wanker pulling such a move. The local council often share videos of these fuckers going round them over pavements - so putting many lives at risk.

It's fairly well established that several tons of metal coming into contact with a human body can have a fatal outcome.