Rabbits, cleaning out and bin bags

[OhFlipMama]

We have pet rabbits and clean them out regularly. I despise using bin bags for this but also hate to loosely throw it all into the brown bin for collection. Because that would stink.

What do people do? We have a compost bin but it's not big enough to keep taking the poo and straw and so on.

I've looked for compostable large bin bags but they're so ridiculously expensive, unless I'm looking in the wrong place?

Bigger / more compost bins?

I have hens and clean out the hen house directly into the green (garden & food waste) bin.

I put it in the brown bin. Why do you care about a wheelie bin smelling? Just shut the lid.

Otherwise put it in the compost bin and sprinkle composting powder over it - it makes it sink down much more quickly. Where I live now we don’t have brown bins so I have to do this. I have 2 compost bins, clean out rabbits once a week and with compost powder it keeps it down. I’ve been down here 7 months and not managed to completely fill both compost bins.

Same as above I use the garden waste bin, it doesnt smell too bad!

Don't know what rules your local authority have but we're not allowed to put any plastic bags in our green bin, compostable or otherwise.
May be worth checking that - have you thought about using paper caddy liners? All our food waste goes in those.
(At least since DH repaired the outside light we can now go to the green bin normally and not with arms outstretched, Bela Lugosi mummy style)

@BathFullOfEels Because it's near the house, may attract rodents and what not.

We have 2 green bins for gardening waste which accepts our Guinea pigs waste (we pay £30 each a year for these to be collected weekly), have you checked if your council accepts small animal waste? No black bags and sawdust & hay is put straight into the bin, we also compost some for garden use. I've heard that allotment owners will often take rabbit & Guinea pig waste so maybe put an add on your local Facebook buy/sell page to enquire about that?

We could fill 4 large wheelie bins of waste a week so I understand the dilemma of what to do with the waste & poo all too well

What bedding do you use? Have you considered hemp based bedding such as aubiose or hemcore, very absorbent and composts down much faster than shavings.

We used to take it all to the dump as you aren't allowed to put animal bedding in the garden waste bin but stopped when the people at the dump directed us to put it in the garden waste skip - now we just put it in the garden waste bin and put a layer of lawn cuttings over the top.

Hemp based bedding sounds like a good idea, off to have a look.

directly onto flower&veg beds.
or get a dalek style composter for the rabbit stuff.

How much waste are you disposing of ?
One of the main advantages of rabbits over guinea-pigs is they are tidy and can be litter trained. So in theory ( Ha! Never works with animals) you could have a couple of litter trays and the soiled bedding when you change it.

I've got my guinea-pigs on fleece in their indoor cage. Their copious waste shakes off and I put the fleeces in a PetBag to wash them.
In their shed they have daily hay bedding changes because they pee and pooh at will.

Could you not pay for someone to come clean your bin after each emptying?

There are companies that do this locally to me, and they are quite "cheap" (imo for the service as I wouldn't want to do it) about £5

Rabbit bedding and poo won’t attract rodents. In any case, if the lid is on nothing could get in.

Rabbit bedding and poo won’t attract rodents

If I leave the guinea-pigs' binbags out the foxes shred them........

If I leave the guinea-pigs' binbags out the foxes shred them........

Because they can smell the guinea pigs and associate that with food. Our friends have a dog which goes crazy when I go round there if I've just been cuddling a rabbit because he can smell it. It's quite funny because he goes running round trying to find it

Rodents wouldn’t be able to get into a wheelie bin though. I can understand if you have to put it in just a bin bag though. Surely your wheelie bin that you put your black bin liners in smells too? Bins do generally whiff.

Second what a pp said about a litter tray though. If you have a large enough hutch just put a litter tray in the area they pop in most. They’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly, you can use wood pellets which can be composted and you have far less waste,