Three weekly black bin collection

[ivykaty44]

Our local council is going to change the black bin collection to 3 weekly, green and recycling 2 weekly the same BUT they will collect food waste weekly

When black bin collection changed from weekly to two weekly there was an outcry, but slowly people got used to recycling more

so is it ok to change to 3 weekly black bin collection now? and everyone will just adjust again

or will it make life difficult for some

[maddening]

We would need a bigger wheelie bin to accommodate it.

[tilder]

This thread makes me wonder how much and what people consume to generate so much waste.

Nobody wants to live near a landfill site. Nobody wants to live near an incinerator. What is the council meant do do with all the waste? Send it in container ships abroad? We do that already and it's really not sustainable.

Create less waste people!

Although food waste really needs collecting weekly.

[mum11970]

We’re 4 weekly for black bin; weekly for plastic, paper/card, glass and food waste. Garden waste is fortnightly and paid for separately to a private company. It’s just about doable for our family of 3/4 adults, 1 teen and 3 dogs but far from ideal. Our trolley boxes for recycling are worse than useless; they’re not big enough and blow away continually.

[InTheLongGrass]

This is fascinating.
We are still on weekly rubbish, and fortnightly recycling collections.
Our bin is rarely even half full, but there are 2 houses on the street who have overflowing wheelie bins on a weekly collection. I'd be fascinated to know how they will cope if (when!) our collection frequency drops.
I think every 2 or 3 weeks would be manageable, unless I'd had a clearout, or were away on bin day - nearly 6 weeks of rubbish could be quite grim.

[Ginnymweasley]

4 weekly collection here. Every week for recycling and food waste. Nappies are collected every week and recycled as well. Most of the time it works fine but sometimes it's annoying. The worse thing is the recycling is a trolley box system and ours got blown away and broken and we are still waiting for a replacement.

[ivykaty44]

bell - yes I forgotten about the water!

[sophandbridge]

Two weeks for green, black and garden here. Our recycling bin is often full but we have food deliveries in cardboard boxes which are big, plus most of our shopping is online, it's probably ninety percent cardboard. We have a milkman who takes back the bottles, yoghurts are in glass jars so they are in the recycling.

In the black bin is minimal plastic, we don't use much, a bit of food waste as we can't get to our compost bin (foxes sleep next to it), it's about half full by bin day, I'm not sure what else ends up in the rubbish bin tbh as it doesn't seem like it should be full.

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

@tilder

This thread makes me wonder how much and what people consume to generate so much waste.

Nobody wants to live near a landfill site. Nobody wants to live near an incinerator. What is the council meant do do with all the waste? Send it in container ships abroad? We do that already and it's really not sustainable.

Create less waste people!

Although food waste really needs collecting weekly.

I’m wondering that too, but I guess it depends on what your council take for kerbside recycling. Ours will take most stuff which is collected weekly, so there’s very little that goes in the general waste which is collected 3 weekly.

OP 3 weekly is fine with a weekly food waste collection.

[Ifailed]

I'm a childminder so have multiply shitty nappies everyday and I can't control what typ people use

You are running a business then, so shouldn't be using the domestic waste service.

[MrsClatterbuck]

Where I live they tried to change it from fortnightly to every 4 weeks. Our recycling and food/garden waste bins would still be fortnightly. There was quite a kick up about it and a local MP got involved and it didn't take place. Imagine bins with nappies after 4 weeks grim.

[LST]

Oh I couldn't cope with 3 weeks! Dog shit and cat litter in the summer for 3 weeks? Mmmm

[Belindabelle]

Our general waste (green) gets collected every 4 weeks. Has been like that for years. Garden waste (brown) is also 4 weeks but only November- March. Paper and card (red) is every two weeks as is plastics and metal (blue). Glass, electrical items and clothes (black) also every 2 weeks. Food waste is weekly (grey).

Mainly we manage ok but need to do a tip run a few times a year if we have a clear out. Our bin lids have to be totally closed or they will not be emptied. We are not allowed to put out any extra black bags, boxes etc. The bins must be placed with the handle facing the road. Bins are regularly checked and If the wrong material is in the wrong coloured bin it is marked as contaminated and is not emptied. Hardcore recycling rules here.

Luckily we have a large garden to store them all but I feel really sorry for those who don’t or worse still people who live in flats that have individual household bins.

[HappenedForAReisling]

I don't understand this. I don't live in the UK but I have black, blue and green bins.

The black bins aren't very big but are emptied every week.

Alternating weeks is black & blue, black & green. It seems to make a lot more sense to me.

Mind you, our system is automated. Only one person in in the truck and arms shoot out the side of the truck, grab the bin and dump the contents into the top of the truck.

[Fairybatman]

We have 3 weekly general waste, alternating weekly tins / plastic / glass and paper / card and weekly compostible waste ( food garden and compostable stuff).

We’ve had it for years now and it works OK. We pay for a bin washing service, the follow the bin wagon and jet wash the general and food/ garden bins for £1 each. It means we rarely get maggots and they never get too smelly even with cat litter and nappies.

Bag everything that goes in general waste and use Jeyes bin buddy in the summer and they rarely smell.

My biggest frustration is the amount of plastic that is recyclable that the council won’t take because there are no UK facilities to recycle it.

[ExhaustedFlamingo]

This would be a huge issue for us. Currently every fortnight and most of the time, that can be a bit of a stretch.

The big issue is my 11yr old son is disabled and in nappies. He won't wear reusable nappies - long story, but it's a no go. He also has bowel issues so produces multiple "dirty" nappies every day most of the time. Without wanting to be too crude, the nappies of an 11yr old are on a different scale to a baby.....it's a lot of waste. And obviously odour issues too.

We recycle loads. Most weeks we fill almost two of the green boxes. It's mainly food packaging I'd say. If food manufacturers could find a way to reduce this, I think it would massively help us all. I go to the tip occasionally but having to pre-book slots now makes it harder - in my area there was a 2 wk wait+ for a slot.

The only thing I could do differently is use one of those brown food caddies. Our food waste goes in the bin, but tbh, there's not a lot of that anyway. We have a dog and he gets any scraps. I'm not using the food caddy because of vermin. We live right next to the river and have a massive problem with wildlife causing damage.

Squirrels have just broken into our attic AGAIN, and there is a constant stream of rats in our garden. It's not appropriate for pest termination etc as they just come from the river a few feet away which is their natural home. In late summer when the weather was warm, a rat sneaked into our conservatory and made its home there. We were using the conservatory as a storage area while we stripped out and redecorated upstairs so there were loads of boxes/furniture. So, that was fun.

Last year, vermin - probably rats - ate through the engine of my car to try and get inside. The car had to be written off. I'd never heard of this but apparently it happens lots in rural areas. I was FUMING.

Can't risk attracting even more creatures so food caddy is a no-go. But that's a minor issue anyway. I'd say nearly all the waste in our bin ends up being used nappies.....it's not pleasant.

[vanillandhoney]

No food waste collection here, and they only collect brown bins in the summer! They stopped in October and won't start again until March

Black bin collection is fortnightly and so is recycling, but because we can't use the brown bin in winter and because food waste goes in the black bin (along with cat litter for three cats plus dog poo bags) our black bin is always full every fortnight.

[Fifthtimelucky]

We currently have fortnightly collections for general waste, recycling and garden waste. The garden waste collection is optional and we have to pay for it. We also have a weekly food waste collection.

There are only two of us here most of the time now, and we could easily move to a monthly waste collection. There is usually only one black sack in our wheelie bin. Even when there were four of us we never filled it. The recycling bin is usually full every two weeks.

I'm not sure how we'd manage a three-weekly collection if we were a large family though and/or had a couple of children in nappies.

[thetemptationofchocolate]

Frazzled2207

Absolutely they should sort. A few times our bin collection hasn’t happened and it was always sorted the following day. Local councillors like sorting stuff like this.

It was a long and sorry story involving daily phone calls to the council. They did come back the next day, took everyone's except ours, then refused to believe that they'd missed a house. I don't often make formal complaints but this time I did. Mainly due to the smell we had to live with.

[EveryDayIsADuvetDay]

Our council lets you report online, which I've just done again as they didn't come again on Friday (and I suspect not on Tuesday either from the volume).
On average I report missing collections every 2/3 weeks. I think I'd rather have less frequent collections that they actually turned up for.
The problem with communal bins is that however much I cut down on waste, not everyone in the block does (surprising as most people here are a lot younger than me, so I'd assume a bit more woke about these things). Most of the idiots don't even manage to collapse large boxes, let alone put things in the correct bin.
Rant over.

[Elphame]

Count yourself fortunate! Conwy has switched to 4 weekly black bin collections....

The recycling is collected weekly but it's a fiendishly complicated trolley box system which is totally beyond me

[woodhill]

Some relatives live in a lovely flat but they don't seem to be under any obligation to recycle, find this hard to understand but there seems to be different rules?

[Notcontent]

I definitely think we all need to reduce our waste but infrequent waste collections can be problematic if you have neighbours who produce a lot of waste. We still have weekly collections and even then there are a few people in my street who seem to have large volumes of rubbish (terrace houses so not much space for it). Less regular would be pretty grim...

[NailsNeedDoing]

I wouldn’t be happy with it but then my council already charge an extortionate extra amount for green waste, and they’re crap at recycling. The do the basics but there’s so much more they could do with kerbside collections before it would be acceptable for them to go longer periods without black bin collections.

[LakieLady]

It wouldn't bother me in the slightest. We half-fill 2 10-litre bags in a fortnight.

Leaving nappies for 3 weeks is gross though.

[GaryWilmottsTeeth]

Count yourself fortunate! Conwy has switched to 4 weekly black bin collections....

The recycling is collected weekly but it's a fiendishly complicated trolley box system which is totally beyond me

I'm in Conwy too, I think the recycling works pretty well. My kids are out of nappies now, but when it started both of them were in nappies.
4 weekly collections only work IMO if nappies and food are collected weekly. If that happens, the general rubbish bin isn't too smelly or full.