To be annoyed with council's '3 black bin bag' rule?

[sallymanda]

Now, don't get me wrong, I do recycle and -9 times out of 10- usually manage to put out only one bin bag out a fortnight.

Yesterday, a leaflet came from council stating that no household should put out more than 3 black sacks a fortnight (for those that don't know, black sacks=non-recyclables).

They say that people can have an exemption from this but there are so many problems with this in practicality:

1, How will bin men know?

2, What about houses of multiple occupation? Flats etc.

3, How much detail must be given to have an exemption? What if a person suffers from an illness that means they cannot control bladder/bowels, do they have to tell the council such personal information? Or, as this is mumsnet, have to put out nappies? Which, after all, can't be recycled?

I am also at the tone of the leaflet- you'd swear that people were committing murder not putting out their rubbish!!

I mean people PAY council tax- it's not as if it's a free collection service.

All this will mean is rubbish lying around the streets.

I'm annoyed (as you can probably guess!) AIBU?

This has been happening in Wales for a good few years now. It's actually not as bad as it seems. It helps people become more strict about recycling, food goes into a food waste bin (by law) so there really isn't too much more to go into black bins. On the odd occasion we go over, we will put one bin with our next door neighbours bins as they are nearly always under the limit. They do the same with us if they have the odd week with more rubbish. But then, my parents do live on a street where everyone is very friendly and neighbourly.

I think 3 bags a fornight is fine!

We are a family of 7 and at one point had two in nappies etc and we manage fine, at xmas and bdays dp does a trip to the dump wree you ca recycle stuff as well.

The only extra rubbish we have at Christmas is packaging from presents which is mainly recyclable.

Yes same here but our recycle bin gets too full so we take otto thr dump where you put it in the cardboard/paper recycling section.

What I find frustrating is that private households aren't the ones making the decisions about how much packaging is put round items, but we're the ones penalised for having to dispose of it after purchase.

I wish there were more incentives for manufacturers and suppliers to reduce the amount of packaging in the first place. It's getting to the point where I'm tempted to unwrap everything on the end of a not-in-use Sainsburys checkout and leave it all in the shop in the first place. Yes, there are some things - fruit, bread etc - where there may be a choice to buy 'loose' rather than pre-packaged, but that isn't always the case by any means.

Linerunner

Of course it's about money. Your council tax doesn't even begin to touch the cost of running a city or county. Most of that money comes from government grant and that is being massively slashed.

I've just had a look at the figures for our local council and where they get their income from:-

Council tax £64m
Non-domestic rates £72m
Other grants £24m

However, most of their income comes from the services they provide so offsetting a lot of the cost. In our council this comes to £310m.

So you're quite a bit off when you say that most of the money comes from government grants

"if a person has time on their hands and are able, they should recycle"

Sorry what? I don't have time on my hands, I have a preschooler and a preteen, and work full time, and have health issues, but recycling isn't optional, it's a household task like washing up and cooking and hoovering that everyone should be doing as a matter of routine.

Obviously there should be exemptions for severe illness and disability (as people have mentioned incontinence products)- and there already are. However, there should not be exemptions from basic citizenship for yuppies who think they are sooo busy. Council tax pays for many things, it doesn't pay for the right to be a numpty.

how much time does it actually take to recycle?!!

i have bin in kitchen for rubbish and a box for cardboard and paper and then a box for glass and any plastic i put in a carrier bag and then just put in the right bin when each gets full, or rather the kids do thats one of their jobs.

it doesnt really take much extra time apart from rinsing out any containers that need it?

We have wheely bins and fortnightly collections here. It has been like that for longer than I can remember. I also have a doubly incontinent, tube fed adult DD living in my house. We manage fine without extra 'privileges/exemptions'. The only thing we had to ask for was an extra plastic tub to recycle our plastics as they take up so much space - but that has nothing to do with extra rubbish produced because of DD.

In this area you can ask for an extra wheely bin if there are more than 5 people living in your house.

We do have to go to the household waste centre if we have a clearout, but then we have to do that currently for cardboard anyway as kerbside collections for that were suspended a couple of years ago. We have loads of cardboard as all DDs supplies come in cardboard boxes and DH keeps ordering stuff from Amazon which always come in boxes much bigger than they need to be

When you buy things with unnecessary packaging on, leave that packaging at the shop/supermarket.

Don't buy things with unnecessary packaging.

use washable nappies.

We have special grey bags for normal rubbish, only allowed to put out 2 bags a fortnight, they won't take black bags and each house gets a roll of 52 bags for the year plus I think an extra one for Xmas week. We then have red bags (unlimited) for paper and card and purple bags again unlimited for glass, tins, plastic etc. we then have food waste bins. We also have a weekly yellow bag collection for nappies and sanitary waste which is then recycled but you have to register for that service. To be honest most things are recyclable, it's mani ly things like broken toys, old crayon pieces, cellophane packaging etc so as a family of 5, one bag of normal rubbish a week is normally adequate, if I have a big sort out I take it to the tip or wait for a time when I only have one bag of normal rubbish

We have 2ds in nappies, waste has just changed to fortnightly so ds2 wears cloth nappies most of the time and ds1 wears cloth about 50% it has made a huge difference, we fill our recycling bin too

as a family of 7 we are entitled to.bigger wheely bins etc but we havent asked for them as no need.

Small supermarket carrier bag, with nothing named in it, left at public bins on the way to bus stop train station etc...daily

Domestic recycling is a ploy to get everyone running around doing things for the environment at great personal cost in terms of time and money, so we miss the fact that large companies are wrecking the planet at will. Especially those in developing countries, and places like China.

It's a weapon of mass distraction. Probably makes less that 1% difference in terms of climate change impact.

if a person has time on their hands and are able, they should recycle,

"Time on their hands" - how much time do you think it takes to stick things in the appropriate bin?

We have three wheelie bins now

• a green one for garden waste;
• a grey one for all other recycling, i.e. paper, cardboard, glass, tins, bottles, plastic;
• a black one for general waste.

The black one is collected fortnightly and the grey and green also fortnightly but on the other week IYSWIM. Honestly, it seems perfectly adequate - the only problem being when the weather was bad and the bin men claimed they couldn't bring the bin lorry on to the estate so we didn't getr a collection.

Last year we holidayed in Germany. We spent a week in an apartment and the cellar of the block had all the various different bins for recycling. We were asked to limit general waste to only one small bin bag (and I mean small - think less than a plastic bag from the supermarket size) per week. At first I thought this a tall order but in fact by the end of the week we hadn't even half-filled the general waste bag. There was a separate bin for food waste which helped a bit.

I recycle everything and usually have space in my black wheelie bin. But at Christmas, birthdays and spring cleaning, I have too much (despite removing all recyclables). I wouldn't mind this sort of doctrine half as much if government placed more onus on manufacturer's to use recyclable materials in their packaging where possible and reduce generally. The likes of Tesco and Unilever have more resources at their disposal (no pun intended) to deal with this problem than your typical householder.

It might be frustrating op but we just cannot continue to send as much rubbish to landfill sad we do. There is far too much packaging on food and far too much food thrown out.

Something which has made a difference to me is having a Bokashi compost system. The food waste sits in the kitchen but thanks to the Bokashi bran doesn't smell at all. It all ends up in the compost heap. I appreciate not everyone has room for a compost heap but a lot more households could be doing this. The number of black bags I put out has halved for doing this.

"When you buy things with unnecessary packaging on, leave that packaging at the shop/supermarket.

Don't buy things with unnecessary packaging."

Easier said than done when you need something that only comes with unnecessary packaging and requires 30 minutes of being attacked with scissors or a bread knife to get into it! Some items hermetically sealed in hard plastic without any sort of tab or 'seam' or cardboard backing are impossible to get into but there might not be an alternative (all the toothbrushes sold by the chemist where I used to live, for example).

We'd use a lot fewer bin bags if our sodding council would recycle cardboard. Seriously! I don't get it. Where we lived before we could pop cardboard in with the rest of the recycling, but here if we want to recycle cardboard we have to take it to the tip where they DO have a special skip thing for it. Which we often end up doing, wasting petrol/damaging the environment to do so a couple of times a month, as we can't fit everything in the non-recycling wheelie bin otherwise.

We can recycle paper, compost stuff, glass, plastic etc - just not cardboard. WHY?!! That's our biggest waste thing!!

Stupid bloody council.

Crispy - my local council doesn't recycle either cardboard or plastic. Fortunately, my local recycling centre is only a mile or two away.

Actually I'm not 100% sure ours does do plastic either (only moved here a short while ago!) We seem to have six million different coloured crates for things so I assumed they did do plastic, but thinking about it, they may well not.

Our nearest tip is about 3 miles away up lots of hills/roundabouts/narrow roads etc so definitely petrol-wasting! Ironically where we lived before, where they recycled EVERYTHING all in one big bin so it was really easy, the tip was less than a mile away but we rarely needed to use it!

If they had a three bag rule where I live I'd look for the house of someone with only one bag and put my extra one out there. There are plenty of older ladies like my mother who buy very little, eat very little and only have a small bag full each week.

Madness to charge less for using the tip than using a roadside collection, Baroness. Unless of course the council don't actually care about the environment at all and just want to save/raise money?

Maybe I shouldn't have called it a tip. It translates as recycling park. They have different containers for different things and you have to sort it yourself. So, one for electrical items, one for plastic, another for metal etc. Paper and cardboard are free.