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 ??????

The vehicle laws are crazy, though, although far from straightforward for councils to rule on, I accept. Take a Fiesta with anything more than the tiniest camping trailer (some areas won't even allow that) once a year and you'll be turned away or charged heavily; go every single day on your own in a VW Transporter with windows and seats, but with every inch of the van except where the driver sits full of junk to get rid of, and that's no problem at all.

Our council allows 12 free trailer permits a year, which is probably the fairest way, but it's still no good for small tradesmen who can only afford to run their van as their single family vehicle. Obviously, there's always the big risk that they'll be dumping tonnes of customers' rubbish every week, but why wouldn't they produce as much of their own personal household waste as any other private household - for which they pay their council tax to be able to use the tip?

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.

Unfortunately that isn't the case in all areas.

If you are buying a fridge or washing machine from ebay or Facebook I am assuming it is not going to get posted to you so you will have to have access to transport to collect it. If you can collect said item you can also dispose of your old one. AO sell fridges for under £100 and charge 20 quid for removal of your old one, so not far removed from the budgets you state above. Anyway, I accept that some folk in genuine financial hardship will struggle. I also don't believe that every old fridge and and washing machine dumped on the street is a result of said hardship, but more a case of laziness and shite attitude.

If you are buying a fridge or washing machine from ebay or Facebook I am assuming it is not going to get posted to you so you will have to have access to transport to collect it.

If you're buying from sombebody local with a decent-sized car, they'll often agree to deliver it to you free or for the cost of their petrol - of course, that way they can get their money and rid of their old item - but very few of them would be willing to take your old one away and then queue up at the tip to get rid of something that was never anything to do with them in the first place.

I do agree that most fly-tipping isn't the result of desperate/poor people though, and that many people who do it are indeed lazy, selfish, unthinking and/or couldn't care less.

I find the charity shop doorway fly-tipping one of the most baffling and selfish - you can't be bothered to put it in your bin or take it to the tip, so you take up the time, money and resources of a charity to dispose of it for you. Some of it might have contained good, saleable items until it got left outside overnight to blow around into the dirty road and get gone through by foxes, weed on by dogs and drunks and/or picked over by people taking anything good and leaving the rest. I wonder how many people who do this would actually be happy buying something from a charity shop that they knew had suffered one or more of these fates before being sold to them.

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

Here, old fridges are taken to a commercial waste recycling centre. They accept them for free and make their money from the metals they recycle (and they are very, very rich - I know the family that own it). The only direct cost to the council is the transport.

It's nothing to do with the cost of disposing of fridges, the £40 fee applies to old furniture, timber and any other large items.

When you wake up and realise a skip is a couple of hundred, the council min collection is £40....and that’s half your monthly disposable income.
Some people are deluded to the financial struggles people face

And there are the total idiots who leave bags and bags of their shit outside charity shops. That’s the middle class version of fly tipping and gives me the absolute rage.

The vehicle laws are crazy, though, although far from straightforward for councils to rule on

Our tip won't allow vans, trailers or any vehicle over 6' high. That would rule out a VW Transporter, I just checked and they're 76.5 inches.

I only found out about the 6' rules when my mate tried take a load of stuff down there in her Discovery, which is also over 6'.

@NailsNeedDoing

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 London council does do free collection. Doesn't stop idiots dumping their crap at the end of the road , presumably hoping it will somehow walk itself down to the recycling centre. I spoke to a council officer putting crime tape on some bags and asked if they follow up, she said they do but that it isn't the nicest job in the world to go through bags of filth looking for names and addresses.

One of the problems is that they do charge landlords who don't choose to use some of their rental income to arrange for rubbish collection when they have a change of tenant. Yes I am looking at you Mr Next Door Landlord, and yes I did report you for dumping those mattresses, I don't know if the council caught up with you, you very sneakily did it at 2 am when no one was manning the website. But they have your car Reg so I hope they were able to track you on CCTV.

What London borough does free collections- all 3 I’ve lived in have charged, Jesus they won’t even take your main bin once a fortnight if it’s an inch further from the curb

I only found out about the 6' rules when my mate tried take a load of stuff down there in her Discovery, which is also over 6'.

Interesting, as a lot of family vehicles are bigger than that - especially bigger families. I've been a few times in a VW Transporter minibus (basically a van with seats), that I've borrowed from friends - they have it purely because they have four children.

They're also on shaky ground there with disabled residents, as most wheelchair-adapted vehicles are vans or very large MPVs. Granted, a wheelchair user would probably need somebody to acompany them and actually dump the rubbish once at the tip (maybe an older teenage child or spouse and the adapted vehicle is the sole family car), but it's an effective way of telling disabled council tax-payers and their families that they can get stuffed when they need to use the facilities they've paid for like everybody else

@LakieLady

The vehicle laws are crazy, though, although far from straightforward for councils to rule on

Our tip won't allow vans, trailers or any vehicle over 6' high. That would rule out a VW Transporter, I just checked and they're 76.5 inches.

I only found out about the 6' rules when my mate tried take a load of stuff down there in her Discovery, which is also over 6'.

It obviously varies a lot I cleared out my late father's home using a vw Transporter involving many trips to the tip. There was no problem with this. But still we get fly tipping.

I've been a few times in a VW Transporter minibus (basically a van with seats), that I've borrowed from friends - they have it purely because they have four children.yes, the vehicle I used was my daughter's family car.

It could inadvertently raise privacy concerns, as they might need to use ANPR cameras, but it would make a lot more sense to concentrate on the frequency of trips rather than the actual vehicle.

That way, people borrowing or using their own large family vehicle, and maybe trailer, and going once every few months - or even a few times over a weekend or week when having a massive clear-out and subsequently not for months afterwards - would be fine.

Meanwhile, anybody with a large vehicle (or even a small one) who is observed going time and time again, continually over a number of months, could receive a warning and threat of prosecution and/or a ban.

It's silly, because the whole idea of a tip is that you only need to use it when you have an unusually large amount of rubbish over a short period. Otherwise, if you only had a couple of black bags every week - that's what your regular bin is for.

Our council used to take three large things for free per year. They stopped that and now charge per item and you have to wait and wait and wait. Our tip is terrible to get into and we have people from well out of the city using it because they don’t have a local top. Fly tipping also increased when black bin collections went from weekly to fortnightly.

Seems like we pay our council tax for less and less each year honestly. However my local parish council have arrived for bulky waste days and guess what happens every bugger else from around the entire city turns up meaning those within the parish cannot always get to use it in time due to others who pay nothing to our parish using it.

It sometimes happens because people are lazy bastards, the tip is free !!! But OMG the queue is long and took me hours. So people dump and run.

OneForMeToo

Do you mean that they use your tip instead of their own or that your tip is their 'local' tip - albeit not that local to them, depending on where they live and if they're rural - and your city happens to have located the tip in your area?

If they don't have a right to use it, the council should clamp down on them and make sure they use their own facilities instead; but if that is their designated tip, it seems a bit unfair to complain about them using it.

Our county has a few main tips and one of the best ones (skips are sunk, so you don't have to climb up slippery steps with heavy/bulky rubbish) is in our next town, in the same county. Our rules changed a few years ago, necessitating permits to be displayed for all resident CT payers in our county (and one neighbouring one, with a mutual agreement, for some reason). The problem is that the town where the tip is has a close-by village that is to all intents and purposes another district of the same town, but it happens to fall across the border to the next county - and then there is a lot of countryside before the next major town in their own county. Now, instead of having a tip half a mile away, they have to either travel a 30+ mile round trip to their proper trip or break the rules and borrow a permit from a friend over the border. I'm not saying they should do the latter, but I can't honestly blame them if they do.

they have to either travel a 30+ mile round trip to their proper trip

Proper TIP - two many 'trips' there.

How do you have a designated tip? And no I mean it’s the other side of the city from me but is City Tip ran by our private contractors for City. But we will get people who don’t live in City and I don’t mean the local villages I mean really outside the City coming in to use it because rules are slightly different to theirs or some how due to locations ours might be 20minutes closer than their City2 tip. There has been talk about requiring proof of council tax to be allowed to use it.

Just like within our city some areas also have parish councils so we pay extra Tax for the local parish. Our parish runs a bulky waste collection every so often held within the parish for the parish. People who again live outside of our actual parish then come and use it when it’s only held maybe once every three months for four hours so you will have to line up with your car/trolly/trailer whatever and it means those who are actually paying for it cannot get in on time due to those who don’t pay for it using it.

Doesn't justify fly tipping but some tips have so many rules you wonder what the bloody point is. Ours only takes stuff you could put in the grey bin anyway and you have a designated week day.

How do you have a designated tip? And no I mean it’s the other side of the city from me but is City Tip ran by our private contractors for City. But we will get people who don’t live in City and I don’t mean the local villages I mean really outside the City coming in to use it because rules are slightly different to theirs or some how due to locations ours might be 20minutes closer than their City2 tip. There has been talk about requiring proof of council tax to be allowed to use it.

By designated tip, I mean your nearest one(s) and/or in your county or local authority area. From what you say, it sounds like yours is NOT the designated tip of many of the people using it.

Our county has a joint scheme with one neighbouring county, and issues a permit so that anybody in either county is free to use any tip in either county. In practice, we have four tips in our and neighbouring towns, but our town one and one of the others have steep steps you have to walk up to the skips whilst carrying your rubbish, which is extremely inconvenient and not particularly safe, so we equally use one of the other two, depending on other shopping/errands we have to do, where the skips are at a much lower level and you can just chuck your rubbish straight in from ground level.

Doesn't justify fly tipping but some tips have so many rules you wonder what the bloody point is. Ours only takes stuff you could put in the grey bin anyway and you have a designated week day.

I completely agree. A lot of councils in areas with major drug problems accept that they aren't going to stop users from doing it, so they provide needle bins in public toilets, so that they have somewhere private to inject and a safe place to discard used needles, rather than just doing both in the street or the park. Many people in charge of discouraging fly-tipping don't appear to have realised this principle.

Also, I'd like to see a nationwide campaign to educate people that scrap men are simply not allowed to take fridges and freezers, because of the gases. Lots of people around us will leave old barbecues, ironing boards, cookers, washing machines, metal toys and cabinets etc out in front of their house and they're seen and taken by the scrappies within a couple of days; but fridges and freezers get left out for weeks or even months.

It would be nice if maybe bin men could be given stickers stating that 'This item cannot legally be taken by scrap collectors - you must take it to the tip or otherwise contact the council on (telephone number) to arrange for its safe collection ad disposal' that they could slap on these items as they spot them on their rounds.

On my phone is a photo of a man standing outside his van, back doors open, pile of conifer clippings, pallets and paint pots he had just thrown out into a country lane. I saw him throw the last pieces out. The number plate is clearly displayed and I have a second picture of him aggressively approaching my car.

The police will not do anything as the photos do not prove he was the person who tipped the waste there.