To think the French system of rubbish disposal is preferable to all these bins?

[Pottedpalm]

I have been spending a lot of time on Rightmove recently and it has reinforced my dislike of the system we have. In areas of small terraced houses the bins often have to be left at the front and locally every house has three bins. It’s even worse where there are no gardens and all the bins are lined up on the pavement.
One large house, split into flats, had nine bins under the front window of the ground floor property.
In areas of France and Spain and probably other continental countries, there are large bins on every street for the various categories of waste. These are emptied very frequently during the night. I think this is is a better system; food type smelly waste can be removed daily and recycling less often.
I suppose people might object if the bins are placed too near to their homes, but in places I have stayed the residents used the bins tidily.

@CaptainMyCaptain

I've seen these big bins in Portugal and they seem to work there. Considering the UK is a place where some people think it's OK to throw all their rubbish out of car windows or leave it in country lanes and playing fields I don't know how well it would work here. There would have to be some really strict laws about littering and fly tipping with appropriate punishments.

I’ve seen those in Portugal too, even in tiny villages and it works a treat. I think part of the success lies in having an army of grannies and grandads sitting on chairs outside their houses watching people’s comings and goings til late at night.

I live in a flat with massive communal bins, and the difficulty is that too many people don't know how to recycle, so they put dirty stuff in the recyling-only bins, which contaminates the lot. All my rinsing out of containers goes to waste.

In my friend's town in Canada, you have to put recycling out in clear plastic sacks, and they will knock on your door to return it if you've put anything in there that might contaminate the rest. People learn quickly.

In the UK, I wish we could just turn over all recycling to First Mile, a firm for commercial waste who really understand how to get the most out of both rubbish and recycling. We use them at work because they are the most sustainable and responsible firm we could find. They could teach the firm my local council uses a thing or two.

@SunflowersAndLavender

I agree with you.

I live in a small city that is very, very organised on the recycling front, which is great. But we have three different types of big wheelie bin plus small compostable food waste bins. They are all collected on a 2 or 3 weekly rotation depending on the contents.

It's also a city with street after street of narrow roads of terraced housing with very little frontage, no rear access to the gardens from the street, and no offstreet parking. Lots of the houses are multiple occupancy due to a high number of students.

Go down any of these streets and it's an ugly, cluttered mess of multi-coloured wheelie bins with stickers and door numbers scrawled all over them, overflowing and creating litter, blocking the pavements and just being a real blot of the landscape. I love Victorian and Edwardian properties but this TOTALLY puts me off buying anything in these streets.

Yep! This is what promoted me to start the thread. There are large areas near the city centre where the only place for the bins is on the pavement. So when empty they get blown into the narrow road. When full they are pushed over for ‘fun’. They are covered in graffiti and the whole street looks run down as a result,

My DD in London has communal bins. Massive ones that service a 4 blocks block of about 80 flats. It's a total disaster.

The borough she lives in requires waste to be split between 4 types of bin - food waste, plastic and glass, paper and cardboard and finally, non recyclable landfill. If a bin is seen to contain the wrong category of waste, it's labelled and not emptied. With 80 households using the bins it's inevitable that stuff goes in the wrong bin, either through carelessness, not understanding what goes where or people not giving a shit. Because of this the bins go unemptied, often for weeks, and the enclosed bin yard is now crawling with rats. So now the bin men won't empty them because of the rats.

DD bags up her rubbish and drops it round to us every week.

I live in an area of the NW which is an old mill town, it's rows upon rows of terraced houses with no open spaces. There would be nowhere to put communal bins

I’m always struck by the neatness of Dutch towns, and how pleasant the environment is.
In my experience this is largely self-policing where people take pride in the environment and refuse to tolerate scum littering; if only we had the same here.

It's a good idea but there's just no space for it in many parts of the UK. I remember thinking what a good idea when I was in Barcelona because the streets are huge and even beside an apartment building, the bin was a distance away. Plus it's not like apartment buildings had loads of space for each household to have their own bins so it makes sense.
That said, I can't imagine there being any space for a large communal bin in some of the Northern two up two down terraced house streets (where you're lucky if you can park your car!) that I grew up in. Maybe if they knocked a house down every couple of streets, but other than that, I can't see it being workable.

Thanks @redcandlelight! So is there a receptacle below the pavement that gets lifted out by a lorry? When you first said it was underground I thought it was a huge cavernous space that lorries drove into.

Surely things like this only work in cities and towns though? We don't even have wheelie bins where we live because there's no space for them! We live in a village on the moors where the roads are about big enough for a car and all of our rubbish bags and recycling boxes have to be precariously stacked on a grass verge on bin day. Most of the little villages and hamlets around here are the same or worse.

I went to Germany for the 1st time back in the 90's and I was so impressed with how organised they were with their rubbish and recycling, a specific bin for everything and they were very strict about it!

Communal bins work well for flats, but if you have an area with houses then people would have to walk further with the rubbish, and they'd have to agree to organise a shared bin as a community.

Here in Germany we had separate bins when we lived in a house. Now back in a flat again, and back to communal bins; I prefer it, too, as you don't have to remember when to put the bins out: even if you put it in the day after they have been emptied, the rubbish is not in there long enough to really stink.

We have bins for each block of flats for the dirty waste (plastic, household waste, compost) and you need a key to use those, so there's not too much abuse. Then there are local bins for paper, cardboard and glass that anyone can use - these are sometimes underground. They get very full/overflow but hardly smell at all.

@Aroundtheworldin80moves

I had four bins in Germany. Plus glass had to go glass bank. The bottle return bottles were separated by shop.

Cyprus used to collect bins three times a week. None of every two or three week schedules.

In Germany there was, 30+ years ago, a 'bulk rubbish' collection every month, odl furniture, mattresses etc., the sort of thing some paople fly-tip. I'm not sure if it still exists but it was wonderfully useful.

in pimlico (part of Westminster), there are big black communal bins on the street at the corner of each block which are v convenient for black bags. but it is a longer walk for recycling and i'm sure the level of recycling must be much lower.

Bit tricky if you are disabled and can't lug bags to the communal bins?

That is not my recent experience of French rubbish collection - although admittedly in a quite rural area.
It was so much worse than the UK.
You could only put out rubbish in official council bin bags, which you had to collect from the town/village hall (almost never open, usually involving a drive).
Recycling collection from your own home much more restrictive than the UK. More of an expectation to drive your recycling to the town/village communal recycling area.

@pinkearedcow

Bit tricky if you are disabled and can't lug bags to the communal bins?

The communal bins are mostly too high for wheelchair users, for instance. But they have someone coming in to deal with that kind of thing. People who are just a bit older/weaker take the rubbish out more frequently or pull it on a little trolley :)

@Notcontent

The Dutch system sounds great. People really need to take more responsibility for their surroundings. But that’s never going to happen in the UK, is it...

It wouldn’t. If this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that British people are stupid, selfish and looking out for number 1.

I have communal bins and hate it, we have the joy of the houses also using them and recently one house that is moving dumping all their furniture in the bins (mattress, tables, a sofa) When they were first caught it was because they thought we had a deal with the council to remove all this stuff. We don't, now they are dumping it in the middle of the night

Where I am in France there are buried separate waste containers. 1 for non-recyclables, one for all recycling except glass and one for glass. The bins are low and can be operated by hand or by using a foot pedal thing. Generally there is a clothes recycling bin too. It's a great system, clean and emptied regularly, especially in summer.

The old dumpster style bins are being phased out it seems.

Going to the dump is also a great experience! You go with proof of address and you get 1 ton free every 6 months. You weigh your car going in and out. The people working there are super helpful and point you in the right direction and will carry stuff if you can't manage. There are also fortnightly on street collections for 'monstres' meaning large and bulky items. You call a number and put the stuff out the night before. By 9am it's gone!

The UK system seems to be in need of an overhaul!

They do have this system in parts of Scotland. My son is in Edinburgh and there are 2 large bins on the street, nobody has individual bins. When my daughter was in Aberdeen it was the same.

I'm in a smallish town that has some flats - they have individual bins, but also brick built bin stores, so they are hidden away until bin day. Interestingly, new flats have just been built and only large bins are available, and purpose built bin areas to hide these bins. Much better - everything neat and tidy.

Where my friends live in France they have to take their rubbish to the bug communal bins. There nearest bins are a 10 minute drive away but their card doesn’t allow them to use those ones (recycling is okay you don’t need a card for those bins), the nearest place for non recyclables including nappies, sanitary items, food etc is a 20 minute drive away. So 20 minutes with all your stinkiest rubbish in the car PLUS you are only allowed to use the card twice a week and the bin will only take a small bag each time. There is no allowance for large households either.

Of course different areas have different arrangements. My Dad used to wheel his wheely bins to the town square twice a week and they’d be emptied.

I’m sure some French residents would love the U.K. system of rubbish being collected from outside your house.

I agree that the litter dropping British public (as repeatedly proved over the last year) are generally way too skanky and entitled to use public bins. Just look anywhere that has a public bin - rubbish either dropped next to it when it has space, or left near it when it is full. And the behaviour of festival goers who just walk away from everything they brought in.

we could of course all live in Central London, where they get daily rubbish and recycling collections, sometimes more than once a day. Check out Islington as an example.

I like the individual bin system but the collection for black bins and cardboard should be more frequent.

We have a holiday home in Spain. The large communal bins are emptied and washed out every night. I much prefer Spain’s system to ours.

I have lived in France for 20 years. We have three bins. Our collections have been reduced drastically this year as well.
I have never seen a communal bin, except outside flats.

My ILs have these big bins in their street but they are constantly overflowing and the seagulls make an absolute mess of the place. I don't think it's a better system unless they provide enough bins for the number of residents, and empty them often enough.