Fly tipping

[daffodil10]

At what point do you get it up in the morning and think ooh I need to get rid of my old fridge freezer, I could take it to the tip or alternatively could drive down a country lane and sling it out ??????

It’s so bloody annoying. There’s a lot of fly tipping on a road near me and honestly I do not understand why the council don’t have a camera up there yet. It’s like every week it needs cleared up.

I think a lot of it is council charges for the tips for van drivers, the commercial licenses are expensive. There are building materials frequently flytipped near me.

Another one is the people you see on local groups offering to take your rubbish to the tip for a small fee, the reason they can offer to take your sofa away for £10 is that they have not paid for the relevant licenses.

I always think it’s someone who’s gone to the tip, gets turned away and then doesn’t want to take it home.

They then find the next best place for them.

A lot of fly tipping around our area is by people pretending to be licensed waste carriers.

I think in a lot of cases householders pay someone to dispose of the waste. But that person doesn't have the correct licence or want to pay for commercial waste disposal. So they fly tip it. Always make sure your waste disposal person is licensed.

You can't take things to the tip easily where I am, you have to book ahead and every time I've looked I can't get in anywhere. It would help if the council said that once you've been you can't go again for 4 weeks or something to let other people have a turn.

And even before covid, hours were so limited there were always queues and people couldn't be bothered.

However, of course it's lazy and horrible and you could pay someone to take it away for you (ensuring they have the right licences etc).

Where I live the county council deals with the tips, but the district council has to deal with fly-tipping, so of course there's no incentive for the county council to improve access to tips as they're not the ones having to pay to deal with fly-tipping.

Councils have to realise we all pay council tax and rubbish disposal is a very important part of that, so stop cutting corners and provide a comprehensive service.

(ditto provision of public toilets)

Also you get "fly tipping" - aka people taking stuff to recycling banks and finding that they're full so they just leave their clothes/shoes/cardboard/whatever anyway. They should be emptied often enough so that situation doesn't arise. I don't think that is fly-tipping unless you dump something that can't actually be recycled at that location. For me, fly-tipping is the dumping stuff in a country lane as OP has said. Or dumping stuff outside closed charity shops.

It's so rife these days. My husband's factory driveway has stuff dumped there every weekend. Fridges, sofas, bin bags. It's less than a mile from the free council tip. As it's on the company's land they have to dispose of it.

My local London Borough, doesn't take paint. So, I had to go onto a separate website, create an account, provide my council tax number and itemise literally every single tin, listing whether it was water or oil based. Other than that, it was a pretty smooth process, but I can see why people fly tip or throw paint in their normal bin.

@Pinkflipflop85

A lot of fly tipping around our area is by people pretending to be licensed waste carriers.

I agree. I think it's rarely someone dumping their own fridge in the countryside. That said, our local tip was shut for a long time during lockdown so I imagine that caused a lot of fly tipping.

We have to book a slot in our recycling centre and it wont allow trailers, we moved house so had a trailer and van, we had stuff to dump which they would accept if it was in a car but not a trailer which seems ridiculous

Where I live the county council deals with the tips, but the district council has to deal with fly-tipping, so of course there's no incentive for the county council to improve access to tips as they're not the ones having to pay to deal with fly-tipping

This is just one of the many reasons that I think the two-tier system is complete shit. If the same authority had responsibility for both waste collection and waste disposal, I'm sure it would be dealt with in a much more cost-efficient way.

If I have a large item I need to dispose of, the district council want £40 or thereabouts to collect it and dispose of it. If I hire or borrow a van to take it to the tip, the county council charge me to take it in (can't recall how much, but it wasn't a token charge, like a fiver or something), because a van is a commercial vehicle. This why we took our old sofas apart and did several trips in our estate car.

When I cleared out my late mother's house, her city council collected stuff like old furniture and white goods for free. They recognised that it was worth doing, because it meant that the stuff wouldn't up being fly-tipped. A London borough I lived in for a while would proved a skip to serve each local area for a few days a month.

I've never come across a council in a shire county area that's done anything like this.

It's not usually the owners themselves- it's the owners paying people to take it away and those people fly tip it.

My husband's factory driveway has stuff dumped there every weekend. Fridges, sofas, bin bags. It's less than a mile from the free council tip. As it's on the company's land they have to dispose of it

I wonder if that's because they've got there and found the tip's closed?

Our bloody tip is only open 10-4 now, so for most people working, they can only get to the tip at weekends. Consequently, the queues at weekends are massive and people have been known to sit in the queue for an hour or more, only to find they close the gates before they get to the front of the queue. There has been a marked increase in stuff dumped at the entrance to some of the industrial premises along the lane that leads to the tip.

When they reopened after lockdown, it was crazy. Because of social distancing, the could only let 6 cars in at a time and at one point the queue was nearly a mile long. They then got staff to manage the queues, and signs out at various points saying "waiting time from this point approx 1 hour" etc.

I think councils need to take significantly more responsibility for things like this. It is inevitable that people will dump things that are hard to dispose of when councils make it so difficult and sometimes expensive to do it properly, on top of charging very high council tax.

People fly tip when the alternative is made too difficult for them, not because they woke up in the morning and fancied decorating a hedge with a freezer.

There was a moron on my street (thankfully since moved) who used to dump unwanted household items on the street with a little hand written sign saying help yourself as if it was some great act of generosity rather then her not wanting to pay for a council collection or take a trip to the dump. It got absurd at one point with an armchair, a rusty bbq and various other items left in the rain for weeks. She woke up one morning to find everything dumped back in her front garden and she got the message.

People fly tip when the alternative is made too difficult for them, not because they woke up in the morning and fancied decorating a hedge with a freezer.

People fly tip because they are selfish cunts with no regard to the environment. It takes 5 mins to submit an online form to the local council who will organise a collection of unwanted items. Low income households are not charged so its not a money issue or even difficult. Just lazy inconsiderate behaviour.

My council doesn’t give free collections to low income households, even if it did there would still be people that struggle to afford over £50. We already pay council tax, it should be included if councils want to avoid fly tipping.

My local top is working as normal now but there is still fly tipping. There is no excuse, even when tips were closed imo, the penalties should be much higher. They pollute agricultural land, block access and cause a blot on the landscape.

It takes 5 mins to submit an online form to the local council who will organise a collection of unwanted items

And ours charge you £40! Many people simply don't have a spare £40, especially if they've just had to fork out for a new washing machine or fridge.

We pay the 5th highest council tax in the country, and I think that a £40 charge on top of that is just taking the piss, frankly.

Sorry, meant to add that they charge that £40 even to families on benefits.

The last time the bin men emptied our black bins they missed emptying mine which was full.

I tried calling the council but the line was not operational due to Covid. I tried over and again using the online complaint form and when I got to the end it froze so I have been stuck with a full bin for two weeks.

Today they are due to empty the bins and mine is there on the street surrounded by black bin liners full of rubbish.

I suffer with anxiety. I am waiting for them to reject the bin liners and can't face going out to speak to them. So what will happen is my bin will have to be filled and I am left in the same position.

No way would I dump my rubbish anywhere but I pay an awful lot of money in council tax and deserve better than this.

I agree that people fly tip when the alternative is too difficult for them either physically or mentally. I am not condoning it.
Lockdown has not helped

£40 charge on top of that is just taking the piss, frankly

That charge is not just a collection fee. Its for the safe disposal, the compressor is removed, any gases and oils are removed, CFCs are captured and metals and plastics are separated for recycling. Many white goods suppliers offer free collection of old items, use one of them next time you buy something. Failing that if your old unit still works charities will collect them for free. Tap up your friends, neighbours or family to help you remove the item to the loca recycle centre, but I guess that requires a bit of effort and might take up your Saturday morning, dumping it in the street is just easier as it is then someone else's problem.

@DillonPanthersTexas totally agree with you.

Whatever it pays for, it’s still too much on to of council tax for many people.

Don’t get me wrong, obviously I agree that fly tipping is a shit thing to do, but like with most things, if you can solve the problem by looking at where it comes from and righting that instead of just pursuing punishment for people you probably won’t catch in the first place, then there likely to be a better outcome.

Many white goods suppliers offer free collection of old items, use one of them next time you buy something.

Those are the privileged words of somebody in the position of being able to go straight to Currys or John Lewis or wherever when the fridge or washing machine gives up the ghost and needs to be replaced. Even then, a lot of them will either charge you an extra £20 to take the old one away or will adjust their prices to take account of it. Either way, for somebody with £300, £500, £800 available, it's not generally an issue.

If you're on a low income and/or benefits, second hand on Facebook or eBay are often your only realistic options, and individuals selling a single used appliance don't usually offer a service to take the old one. That £40 or so charge could actually equal the price of the 'new' one.

Added to that, those who can afford a new Bosch washing machine will probably not have to worry about scrapping it for 10 years or more; those who can only pay £50-£100 each time, for a well-used/cheap one are likely to be needing a new one every year or more often.

In fact, considering that it's really pot luck what you get when you have no choice but to buy dirt-cheap from Facebook, with no consumer rights, you could even argue that some better-off people are fly-tipping on to poor people, and making them pay for the privilege.