AIBU - neighbour moving rubbish bags to my front door

[PregnantAnnoyed]

Dear MN - I need you help. Am I being hormonal and unreasonable (I’m heavily pregnant), or am I right to feel really pissed off. In the case of the latter - what should I do next?

I live in central London. Our street is all terraced houses, divided into flats with a few businesses at ground level - little restaurants, a chippie, a pub across the road, a corner shop at the end of the street. A lot of people pass by on a daily basis.

Domestic rubbish collection is officially once a week on a Friday morning and everyone is supposed to just leave their bin bags out by the nearest lamppost for collection. That said, rubbish trucks (for commercial waste I guess) do come most other mornings as well and pick up whatever’s out.

It’s not ideal but would work OK if residents just left their bin bags out the night before rubbish collection days. This doesn’t always happen and things get gross when bags are left out at random times of day and on the few days when no rubbish collection happens. Crows and foxes rip the bags open and rubbish goes everywhere. It also seems to encourage people passing by to just drop their loose rubbish in piles by the lampposts. The pavement is narrow and the whole street quickly starts to look like a landfill site, with loose domestic waste all the way up to people’s front doors.

So this am, I was leaving home when I saw a man from a few doors down move a gross, ripped bag of waste with wet wipes and kitchen scraps and crap literally falling out of it, from the lamppost outside his door to the (hitherto completely clear) lamppost outside of our front door. It was so unusual that it hadn’t really registered what he’d done until he was walking away. I just stood and stared at him in disbelief and, when he clocked this, he just stood in place and stared back. It was like some sort of passive aggressive stare-off.

I just stood and scrolled on my phone and he left eventually, which is when I moved the gross bin bag back to where it was, where it’s still sitting now (until collection tomorrow am)

AIBU?

Yes - how dare he move a waste problem from his front door to someone else’s
No - he can hand-move rubbish from outside his door to wherever he wants if he is that concerned about it

If I’m NBU, what should I do next?

To pre-empt a few questions:

• I don’t know who he is and while I know his house number, I don’t know which of the 4 flats is his
• I’d like him to stop. Rubbish attracts more rubbish and I don’t want the whole street and everyone passing by to dump waste by our front door
• though I don’t have proof, this may have been going on for a while as there’s been a bigger than usual pile of rubbish by our front door lately
• the man was middle aged and middle class, so probably not the kind to retaliate with violence, intimidation etc but could still be an entitled arse and not back down if challenged
• I don’t particularly want a confrontation or to make enemies out of neighbours

Help MN!

Thank you, yes, we’ve done notes through letterboxes with “reminders” of the rubbish collection system (including criminal offence details and accompanying fines) in the past and they’ve been quite successful.

I think most of the offenders are newly moved-in students and suchlike whose landlords just haven’t bothered to talk them through the details.

I do feel like I’d be solving the shitty neighbour man’s problem for him, but perhaps I’ll add to the note that moving fly-tipped rubbish makes you a fly-tipper too. He should recognise himself!

Double check the rules. Ours (Lambeth) is collected overnight but the rules are that rubbish is not to be put out before 6.00pm the night before and it should be left on doorsteps not the pavement. (I know because our neighbours, and she is a Councillor, leave it on the pavement from about midday the day before meaning pedestrians have to step out into the road in prder to get past. I pity the mums with buggies, neighbours clearly don't care.)

I like the Westminster approach with big bins on many street corners.

How about the residents association leafletting the street. Foxes and rats are inevitable.

Islington - council allowed the development of 7 flats accross theoad with a spacious swish reception, but no arrangements for commmunal waste bins, so it all gets dumped in front of my flat - also a similar arrangement for older terraced houses a bit further along the street, I don't think it's uncommon in London.

take a photo of him if you see him do it again, post it on local facebook/next door, etc (possibly blanking out his face - be guided by what else gets posted & is accepted.)
Local nextdoor.com seems to be a bunch of bigoted racist twats, but they love a good whinge.

I like the Westminster approach with big bins on many street corners.

Really? I didn't know that. There aren't any where I live in Westminster but maybe that's because we're in a clear pavement zone. DS had a communal street refuse bin when he lived in RBKC, which was great, although it didn't stop fly tipping completely.

So it seems boroughs have different strategies within them. Are there any street communal refuse bins in your borough at all, OP? If there are, maybe you could lobby for one at a specific site rather than complaining about fly tipping in general? You might have more luck if you can find an appropriate location and do the council's job for them...

I'm eye rolling so much at the commentators on here who just don't understand how central London refuse works. I live and work in London and know exactly what your situation is. However most areas I know that work like this are very good and put their waste out the morning of collection - Kensington for example.

How are we meant to know how it works in London if we don’t live there? Do you know how it works in Edinburgh or Belfast?

I would find that really annoying and think you did the right thing moving it back. I used to live in very central London, on one of the roads off Oxford Street. Back then rubbish collection was every day at 4am, and residents used to leave their bags next to the street bins for collection. I guess there have been budget cuts but it would help if the very central boroughs like Westminster and Camden still did that.

It's still the same in the Westminster clear pavement zones, BlackberrySky. Twice daily collections for streets with mixed residential and commercial use, several times a week for residential only streets.

Westminster also has the lowest council tax rates in the entire country (1/4 of the cost of council tax in Gateshead, the most expensive!), followed by Wandsworth, Hammersmith & Fulham, City of London and RBKC, so no excuse for budget cuts. Ironic that the wealthiest boroughs charge the least council tax.

Cheshirecar, it might only be Pimlico, but great. Large bins, with lids, and the size of skips, on many street corners, effectively taking up a parking space, so no rubbish left on pavements and you can just dump it whenever suits. Our collection south of the river is 4-6am so rats/foxes have a chance to feast first. And because it is on our doorstep we have to sort out any mess. (Same obviously does not apply to Cllr neighbour who, by blocking the pavement with her six or so bags, can rely on local street sweepers to clean up.)

It’s such a densely populated area here, that there would have to be loads of communal bins to deal with the issue, that there just isn’t the space for. One side of our street is all terraced houses, but the other side, all the side streets and the roads at either end are lined with old mansion blocks, newer apartment blocks and an estate with high rises. The recycling bins at the end of the street that I mentioned comprise of 3 massive units and they overflow every week. It’d likely be even worse for bins for normal waste as, in addition to residents, they’d be used by tourists / visitors to the area as well (and there are loads of those here).

The pavement-side waste collection system we have can work OK, but when it doesn’t the council take no action, so it’s essentially up to the residents to police themselves. That isn’t ideal, but can be fairly successful if everyone takes a little responsibility. I just wasn’t expecting another permanent resident to be such a shit about it by moving ripped rubbish bags to my front door rather than thinking about who he needs to talk to to stop it happening (like - the council and/or new student tenants in his building).

@Needmoresleep the situation with your councillor neighbour who flagrantly disobeys the rules she’s responsible for making/upholding would piss me off so much! Have you thought of reporting her for fly-tipping or something?

Three points:

1. Get up the arse of the local authority (unless it’s Westminster which is why you pay fuck all council tax- pay peanut get monkeys) Seriously though, how do people in Manhattan or Tokyo or the 1st to 5th arr in Paris get on? Surely it’s not this crap? Why does Zone one in London have to be so shit?
2. Shout “fuck off with your rubbish” to the twat leaving this crap outside your door. You say he is middle class, so watch him SCURRY away.
3. Move. This area sound horrible. Why would you enjoy living there? ugh.

Needmoresleep, you should definitely report your neighbour! Poor street sweeper having to deal with that.

Surely the high rises mansion and modern blocks have some communal storage, OP? DS lived on Earls Court Road and they have the communal street bins there, it sounds like your neighbourhood is a similar area? They weren't meant for daily use, just for overspill if you have nowhere outside to store rubbish until the weekly collection and your kitchen bin is overflowing. I think they were emptied twice a day when the commercial rubbish was collected.

@Bootikin love your second point! I wish I had the confidence to do it!

Ha. Put it this way, we are looking forward to Labour doing some campaigning on our street! Though I suspect it is a politician thing rather than a party thing.

(I did think of reporting her during the first lockdown when she tweeted a picture of herself on a long distance train, shortly followed by a tweet criticising Dominic Cummins for doing similar, but then could not be bothered.)

Some people clearly don't think of others. The rubbish blocking the pavement bemuses rather than bothers me, but then my days of buggy pushing are long past. OP I completely understand your frustration, but if asking politely does not work, probably nothing will.