to be a bit pissed off that after all the cuts, £250,000,000 has been 'found' for weekly bin collections?

[Annpan88]

Correct me if I'm wrong but after all these cuts to services and people losing their jobs, I believe the government has decided to make changes to the minor Inconvenience that is fornightly bin collections?

Yes, it is a bit of a pain in the arse but I don't see how its the most important thing in thw world and I'm guessing people are pretty use to it.

I just wonder if people are feeling like me, AIBU?

What are you talking about woman - 50 is young-ish

The idea that weekly collections is "a basic right" is frankly preposterous. I used to live in an inner city and weekly collections always continued there - this is the right choice for an area where wheelie-bins are impractical due to the preponderance of Edwardian terraced houses and flats with limited access to the street. There was also a problem with rats which could only have been have been worse had black binbags been allowed to pile up in the street for a fortnight. I now live in a more suburban area where wheelie-bins work fine as houses mostly have driveways and garages and/or bigger gardens. It's about matching the service to the needs of the local area, and most places can cope with fortnightly collections, IME.

Much as it pains me to say nice things about a Tory council, the recycling service here is really good (paper/glass/tin/plastic/cardboard/juice cartons all in one bin, garden waste and all food waste in another) and fortnightly collections work just fine. We are still using disposable nappies and our black bin is never more than half full. A lot of my neighbours are pensioners, I would guess that they are mostly Tories and the most popular papers seem to be The Daily Mail and The Sun, yet they all manage to put their bins out on time and they also apparently manage to put the right rubbish in 3 colour-coded bins without "spending half the week recycling". I was very pleased to note that my local council have confirmed that they do not intend to reintroduce weekly collections - in fact their spokesperson has said that they feel the government's proposals appear to reward inefficiency on the part of local authorities!

YANBU at all, i agree, its a huge waste of money that could and should be better spent elsewhere.

fwiw we are a family of 7 and until recently had 2 in nappies and still coped fine with a regular sized wheelie bin (we are entitled to a bigger one as there are 7 of us but have never needed it) we have a regular rubbish bin, a big recycling bin and also a box for glass and a bin for food.

recycling and rubbish collect fortnightly and food waste once a week, its a small bin and obviously would get smelly etc. this system works fine!

I agree with you about it not meaning you "have to spend half the week recycling".

I have two bins in the kitchen: a pedal bin for general waste, and on open wooden, waste paper type bin (an Ikea one). If it's recyclable, it goes into that one. If it's not, it goes into the pedal bin. Now that we can put cardboard into the recycling, the wooden bin gets filled much more quickly. It's ds' job to empty that one so I he now needs to take it to the bin every couple of days, whereas the pedal bin probably only needs to be done twice a week.

How difficult is that?

The glass bottles are more of a hassle - they tend to congregate beside the pedal bin until they embarrass me too much either dh or I can be bothered going downstairs to the garage to get a couple of boxes so that we can take them down to our purple (glass) wheely bin - but that's just laziness on our part

I still support the weekly bin collection which we have here. However I always make an effort to recycle. i just would not put all the rubbish in one bag.

The people who do this are just ignorant and lazy and whatever system you had they still wouldn't bother.

MrsH - Its really rather spiffing that you dont have the rat problem to 'get'. We do round here so I do 'get' the argument sadly. Its not my bin that attracts them as we use the 100 different bins we have properly, as I said earlier its the knob heads who just dont give a shit about what should go in which bin and leave them in the street thats the problem. These people are not going to change, they do happily leave bin bags of food and other waste on the street and I have walked past bags full of maggots before now and its been 5 - 6 weeks before the bin men finally admit defeat and move them.

I dont 'get' the fuel argument as we still have weekly collections for the other rubbish, its the same trucks, the same bin men, and it goes to the same place. Infact where I work a colleague has visited a refuse plant and he said its a fucking joke - he sat and watched the recycling trucks come in, tip their load onto the conveyor to get sorted, and then watched a 'normal' refuse truck come and do the same to catch the refuse that hasnt been put in the right bin

On the subject of rights - Its a basic bloody right that my DS (any child) and the dog should be able to go outside in the garden to play without the very real risk of one of them disturbing a rat and possibly getting bitten.

PLEASE MAKE SURE NOT TO CONFUSE ME WITH OTHER CUSTARDS

thanks

presumably other-Custard the snow area depends on where you live; here in Wales it's what, once a year and then they get to you ASAP; if you are in the Highlands would be a bigger issue I can see.

We have a big bin we used to fill weekly, we now fill it fortnightly. I know others are not so motivated by them skipping into our bin but meh, some people are just gits. It's certainly halved our waste.

I'm sorry custardo - I'd noticed I'd made a mistake and quoted you in error - meant to come back on and say I meant CustardCake but didn't

thats ok my lovely.

Our bins weren't collected for weeks because of the snow - understandably, as the bin men had been redeployed to try and help keep the roads open. It was not big deal because we (my neighbours and my family) generate so little waste.

Until we went to fortnightly collections for our green bins, we did have the ridiculous situation of one bin lorry coming down the road to pick up the the (half empty) blue bins, to be followed the next day by another bin lorry coming down the road to pick up (what would have been quarter empty if we didn't share the bin with our neighbour - bit even so, still half empty) green bins and another day a lorry coming to collect the (half empty) glass recycling. To be fair, the brown bins were almost always full to overflowing.

In fact, if the bin men were late in picking the bins up, there were some weeks when we would have a bin on the kerb every single day of the week

Saturdays - green (general), Fridays - blue (recycling), Wednesdays - brown (garden), Mondays - purple (glass). What a waste - and what a hassle - and it also meant that our lovely wide street was constantly "littered" with wheely bins. Made a bit of a mockery of being in a conservation area.

Now it's all on a Friday, green and brown - every fortnight, blue every other fortnight, with purple every four weeks. Seemplezz!

that does sound like bad planning, prettybird.

we have 1 bin collection, on Tuesdays - the general waste (red bin) goes every week, & the recycling (blue) & garden waste (green) alternate.

It all goes in the same lorry, I do hope it goes in separate sections...

paper/cardboard lorry comes every other Thursday

Well my Bin men are back on strike soon.
It will be interesting to see how people react.
My view is to throw away as little as possible so that it proves the guys ARE overpaid for what they do.
I suspect that slovenly people will just dump stuff everywhere
But the fly in the ointment is that the Students are back. All 20,000+ of them.
If the two universities impress on them to behave, the city might not stink as much as it did last term.

I'd LOVE to know what Pickles "has" on Cameron.

Well there we are, 44 years old, spent 8 years in community recycling/waste industry, and have only just realised (how naive I am!) that Tories were in favour of spending MORE on public services for anything! Don't they (you pro-weekly collection people) realise you would be paying for collections other people don't want or need? Surely this goes against conservative values? Wouldn't you find it preferable to pay for any additional collections you require?

Pickles says that everybody should have the right to buy more food than they can eat and throw it in the bin to rot
You can tell he has no children.
Otherwise he would not be so cavalier about wasting the earths' resources for our children to pick up the bill.

Eric Pickles : The face of short term greed and the throw away society.

Talkinpeace2 - That's exactly it! That is the right he wants us to have. Bring back rationing I say!!!!

I'd be happy if people could credit me with thinking of the wording
but PLEASE spread the thought far and wide
Make Pickles and electoral liability for Cameron
then we can be shot of some of his stupid ideas

Eric Pickles : The face of short term greed and the throw away society.
Eric Pickles : The face of short term greed and the throw away society.
Eric Pickles : The face of short term greed and the throw away society.

If we have a bag over for any reason- say we were away for the collection- we call the council, pay £3 (less than petrol to the tip) and they take it, ditto bigger items such as defunct fridges- max cost is about a tenner which is far less than the price of a van to take a double bed with mattress away (what we were charged that for).

That money then goes into council coffers, so in effect if you make more waste you pay a surcharge on top of council tax to cover that.

Suits me fine.

Pretty that's nuts! We have a recycling wagon every Wednesday and a bin collection alternate Wednesdays; if it's delayed it goes back a day or so. Dates on council website.

To be fair on the council - they do now seem it better balanced. I was describing it as it used to be.

The recycling and "general" waste are now alternate weeks. The brown (garden waste bins) are every fortnight during the "growing" months (out on the same day as the general waste) and round where I live are usually full to overflowing (everyone has large gardens - the sort that in SE England would probably have 2 luxury 4 bedroom houses squeezed on them). The glass collection is the only one that is probably a bit over egged - they given us a skinny wheely bin and even though it is every 4 weeks, it is still only half full between the two households (so we never use the other bin that we were given). You'd be having to drink a helluva lot of wine/beer in bottles to fill them!