to be sick of the whole waste bin and recycling charade

[rogersmellyonthetelly]

We were put on fortnightly waste collections a couple of years ago, and since then, despite recycling everything i can, my green bin is overflowing by the end of the first week, and the second week i have to take my bags to the tip meaning my car stinks of rubbish and the potential for bacteria laden leakage is high

I thought I must be doing something wrong, but if I am, then 90% of families on my street are too, including the lentil weaver at the end who knits her own nappies and recycles anything thats not nailed down.
does anyone else feel just a leetle bit pissed off with their council about this? I mean they send us a council tax bill, they dont tell us what they actually spend it on. they tell us we dont need weekly waste collections, but noone actually asked us about this, and they are blatantly ignoring the evidence on the streets every bin collection day that actually, 90% of us CANT manage on a fortnightly collection. We are paying customers, surely we should have some say in what its spent on? I'd happily pay an extra £8 a month for a weekly collection, and save me an hour of disinfecting my boot after every tip run. it would also save the street from being covered in crap and refuse when foxes get into the bags left next to the bin in desperation, or the dozens of plastic bottles which blow up and down the street (and end up littering the hedgerows since no fucker ever picks them up) on recycling day because the crates they give us are too small and the top net is ineffective.
sorry if this sounds ranty btw, am just horrendously pissed off as as have just had a bin bag burst on my way to the car dribbling manky beans all over my suede boots and down the path, a regular occurrence im afraid.
so, does everyone else manage ok with the every other week bin emptying? or is it just me and my street who are lazy feckers.

Perhaps need to look at what you're throwing away. Non-recyclable/non-compostable should be minimal and if you're throwing away a lot of food look at what you're buying/cooking. How did the baked beans become manky? Don't open a tin unless you know they're going to be eaten before they go manky.

Don't put the effort into going to the tip, put some effort into reducing the waste you produce.

I moan about our collection but that's about the time it takes them to sort the recycling at the roadside rather than centrally sort.

We have 2 boxes for recycling and a food bin (plus caddy for the kitchen) and they are emptied weekly. They also take plastics which a neighbouring council doesn't do so I end up with my mothers most wks too.

A green bag for garden waste that is now monthly but is fortnightly for spring, summer.

We have a wheelie bin for everything else that gets collected fortnightly and even when I had 3 in nappies I rarely managed to fill.

Rogersmelly - if you get a compost bin (black dalek thing with a lid but no bottom) then the dog shouldn't be able to roll in the compost - in lots of places you can get them cheap www.getcomposting.com/

I have something like 7 recycling bins and bags - I don't think I am stupid (who does!!) but the way recycling is done is shockingly bad in our county - fiddly instructions and fortnightly. I also think it is just lip service and a quick way to push responsibility on to the householder to ensure that recycling targets are met, as the collectors just seem to dump the sorted waste into the trucks.

However, we do have a kitchen waste collection every week and a special bin collected weekly when my children were in nappies.

It really blows having the added joy of not only keeping a house clean but also having to sort rubbish - and if it isn't correctly done or someone puts a rogue item in your dustbin it is not tipped out.

And, why block already busy roads with the trucks during rush/school hours!!

Your bin set up sounds rubbish, rather inadequate OP, I can see why you're cheesed off. I bet your council really didn't want to adopt a recycling regime, got collared into it by the govt.
Like KatyMac I am in Norfolk, and are system is really good, no complaints. It takes us (6 people) up to 6 weeks to fill either bin, anyway. Friends in Wales seem to have a very good system, too, takes more variety than ours, even.

Ours is brilliant (Cambridgeshire) - black wheelie bin for general household rubbish, green wheelie bin for compostable matter (kitchen peelings and garden waste, and cooked meat bones), blue wheelie bin for recyclables (glass, tins, paper, cardboard, plastic bottles). All are collected fortnightly

The black one is never full, the green one only is if we're on a gardening push or have received lots of new things in cardboard boxes. The blue one is usually near enough full when it's collected - it's amazing how much packaging you can get through.

We have a system similar to stealthpenguin, the council alternate between black bags one week and blue bags for recycling the next. We are allowed as many blue bags as we like and everything gets chucked in, except paper which is meant to be separate, but I think I'm the only one inmy street who does that!! We also have a food caddy which is quite large and this is collected every week. We are only allowed four black bags per fortnight but we hardly get near that! Even with DD still in nappies. But my mum who lives in the next county has a useless system. Seems that we are lucky having read this thread! Our council also sends a note in with the council tax reminder to say where they are spending the money, eg schools, how much the police get etc , sorry

What you need is a bokashi compost bucket, it's a system that can take cooked and animal food, and is sealed when you're not actively putting more in. I've heard, never actually tried it myself mind

Or you could serve your kids tiny amounts, then offer seconds if they actually eat it

We are a family of 4 + dogs, 2 adults and 2 children under 3.

We have 3 bins, Green for recycling, Black for general rubbish and Brown for garden waste. Ours are fortnightly collections and we will very easy fill up the bins before collection day in fact as it sits right now my Green bin is overflowing, my black bin is also over flowing one is due to be collected this week the other next week. This system just does not work for us.

Have a compost heap in the garden if you have one. It's dead easy. It's not smelly. It doesn't attract rats if you do it properly.

You Council, by the way, is legally obliged to tell you what it's spending your money on.

OP I feel your pain.

We went to alternate fortnightly rubbish and recycling collections (one bin for general rubbish, one for recycling only) and food waste each week - sodding bin men take the food waste on a daily basis as far as I can tell but dont empty the right bin they are meant to empty on the right week - so every week I have to call up the council and complain, bin men lie and say they've done it (when they havent), I complain again and it finally gets picked upon the day before the next week's alternate bin is due to be collected (but isnt). I'm thinking about asking the council to reimburse all of my time and effort spent chasing up their sodding bin men!!

Yes it sounds like your council are making it much harder than it needs to be. Our council introduced a new system 2 years ago which works really well - a big green wheelie bin for all recyclable stuff and a slimmer black wheelie bin for non-recycle stuff (both fortnightly) plus 2 small food containers - one for inside and one for out which are collected weekly. The borough has gone from being in the bottom 10% for recycling to being in the top 3 (actual 3, not %) now, so it shows what an easy system can do. Now we only get issues if a collection is missed for some reason - last Christmas was horrid due to the snow and we were about 4 weeks without a collection but aside from extremes like that, it's great. Definitely bug your council!

Do what they do in Germany. Strip all all unnecessary packaging at point of sale and leave the shops to dispose of it.

I recycle everything that's not nailed down, dh goes through phases of ordering massive things that arrive in massive cardboard boxes and we don't have a problem with fortnightly collections.

black bin fortnightly - general waste
recycling fortnightly - green bin (food+garden clippings), 2 plastic crates and 2 large refuse sack type bags.

Our green bin is nasty as it's had a fortnight of food waste festering in the bottom if there is no garden waste to fill it up with.

Home recycling and bin collections has become the new talking-about-the-weather. We love it don't we.

FWIW here in Charnwood, Leics, we have a general waste wheelie bin and a mixed recycling wheelie bin, both collected alternate fortnights. Seems to work alright, although we pretty much fill them in 2 weeks and they won't take anything that doesn't fit in the bin...

We used to have three separate bins when we lived in a house and the council would only collect fortnightly. It was a nightmare and we always filled them up too quickly, not to mention time consuming and annoying as the recycling was always monitored and not always clear about what was allowed.

We moved to central London last year and now live in a flat, there's a big communal bin downstairs and communal recycling bins so we just get rid of everything as we need to. No recycling police so it's so much easier and we don't have rubbish cluttering up the house and making it smell. I find living in a block of flats far more convenient in many ways, it is so much better than the suburban house we had before.

Our bins are fortnightly too. We don't tend to fill the bin in a fortnight but have had collection problems. They decided they wouldn't collect any bins less than 2/3 full.

We got in a mess when they didn't empty the bin for being too empty. It was just short of 2/3 full so when not emptied we ended up with significantly more than the bin could hold a fortnight later. The tip is about 10 miles away, a pain without a car. It was also rather smelly with month old waste in it.

I agree with others, look at how you can reduce what you are throwing away. In your situation I would put things that weren't manky but needed to go into the rubbish in another container. If at the end of 2 weeks you can fit this in with the rubbish then great, if not it isn't so disgusting to take to the tip. This of course is a temporary solution, you need to talk to the council about a long term one for everyone.

We've currently got a great system that everyone seems to cope with. Weekly collection of black bag waste, alternate fortnightly collection of mixed recyclate (metals, paper, glass etc) or garden waste.

Inevitably because it works and everyone seems to like it we're changing to a new system of fortnightly black bag waste and weekly kerbside sorted recyclate. Only problem is that we currently get 240 litres every fornight and we're going to boxes with 55 litres capacity weekly. Because I work in the industry I know that all my sorted waste will be taken to a great big shed where machines will mix it all up. :(

The driver for this isn't cost it is the need to reduce landfill inputs by the way. If they collect less through the household collection then on paper they can demonstrate a reduction in household waste going to landfill. The fact that the waste gets fly tipped, burnt or dumped in supermarket bins is irrelevant as long as they can demonstrate a reduction in household waste.