to think reducing general waste collections to every 3 weeks is unrealistic?

[HazelMember]

The council has reduced general waste collections to once every 3 weeks instead of twice a month. The general waste wheelie bin is already half the size of a normal bin.

I already recycle as much as possible. Cardboard plastics food waste glass tins everything. I am genuinely trying to do the right thing environmentally. But even with all that the general waste still builds up especially with a family.

Three weeks feels like a long time to store rubbish. I keep seeing just recycle more as the answer but I am already doing that. There is not much left to recycle.

How are people actually managing this? Are you just producing less waste somehow or are your bins overflowing too?

AIBU to think this change does not reflect how households actually live?

If you don't already, try collecting soft plastics for recycling on supermarket trips. We massively reduced our black bag contents doing this. We use an old nappy bin to store it.

The streets will be littered with bloomin thousands of bins , stinking , blocking pavements and I’d hazard a guess a lot of people won’t have a scoobie to know how to use them much less care . If rather money was spent on the potholes blighting out neighbourhood because it’s becoming dangerous with people coming over to our lanes trying to avoid potholes.

We have recyclable and black bin alternate weeks. Recyclables usually jam packed and black bin half full or less so I'd like this.

Family of four. We manage just fine with 4 weekly general waste collection by recycling almost everything. That includes plastic food trays etc however which many areas don’t. Also recycling all paper and card, plastic bottles, cans and glass

I occasionally do extra trips to the tip but not very often

I buy in bulk, so have less waste each week, the same with spices. I soak my own pulses, i WFH so have time. We do have tins of coconut milk and use milk for tea, so only a tiny bit. For tomatoe based sauces ive grown them, so I freeze them for use along the year. The same with other veg. We don't have a bland diet, i think having the space to grow out own food really helps, we also have a deal with the neighbour, where we swop foods, they have chickens so we get eggs we generally have an abundance of apples, pears and berries, courgettes etc.

We have olives and pickles, though the pickles tend to come from my Nana and I give the jar back so she can reuse it.

Not difficult, but impossible. I am not allowed access. My modes of transport are foot and bus, which don't allow me access. And as a last resort/ emergency, a taxi, which is also not an option. What can pedestrians do? I would even be willing to travel out of my area, on a bus, with a bag of rubbish if I had the option as a ridiculously inconvenient last resort. This ridiculously inconvenient last resort isn't even a possibility.

Edit because I can't spell!

That will smell bad in the summer.
You could always buy another bin? I've got 2 because mine went missing so the council replaced it then mine showed up 2 months later. I don't generally need 2 but it's handy at Christmas and for kitchen cupboard clear outs! You could say yours has gone missing and get a 2nd bin.

"If you have incontinence contact the council. We have a white bin for my mums pads that is picked up by a specialist company for medical waste."

Many councils, mine included, don't provide a specialist service for incontinence pads. You are expected to put them in the general waste.

I really do think it’s one of those things you do sort of adapt to. When it came in for us about 5/6 years ago, we thought the same as many people on here. But actually we’ve never had an issue. We do have a food waste bin which I think is important, plus plastics and cardboard (would love a glass collection but we have to take that ourselves). Food bin is weekly and the rest are on a three-week rotation.

It did make me realise that we were being a bit lazy, thinking we were good at recycling but doing things fairly often like lobbing out of date packets of food in the black bin instead of removing contents into food bin and then recycling packaging. But even with nappies and some dog poo bags, we’ve never had to do an emergency tip run or have had an overflowing bin, even with this delayed collection and all the Christmas stuff in.

Black bin rubbish is definitely the thing we have least of. We would struggle more with a delayed cardboard or plastic collection.

So I think most people will be fine with it, you just have to adapt a little and if you’re decluttering and chucking stuff out, plan for that instead of filling the bin.

We've just gone 3 weekly for black bin general waste. We have pets and I just about manage apart from over christmas when we had to go to the dump, it was over 5 weeks between collections. I find recycling hard, I'm often unsure what's recycleable and what isn't.

Our black bin is every 2 weeks but it’s never full. So 3 weeks would be fine for us.

One thing that has helped is we collect the soft plastics and take them to the supermarket (Sainsbury’s/Aldi/Co-op near me all collect soft plastics).

Food waste is collected every week.
We have a compost bin in the garden, and pay for a brown bin for garden waste.
The recycling bin takes all tins, paper, glass.

Old clothes we take to the charity shop or clothes bank.

So there’s not loads to go in the black bin, really. We don’t have babies or pets admittedly.

But overall I hate seeing all these wheely bins everywhere. It’s the first thing you see in most people’s front garden.
In the Netherlands they have communal underground bins on each street, it’s so much nicer.

Surely this is one of the most basic services provided by Councils, so why should you have to pay for it twice? Just like all the tax for the NHS when in practice if you want timely and competent treatment you have to pay privately, and all the tax for schools which in practice make no provision to educate many children with specific educational needs.

We need a system like in most countries where if you pay privately for something that should be provided from tax revenue you receive a proportional tax rebate.

We switched to 3 weekly general waste collections about a year ago and with 5 people aged 17 plus in this house it's been fine.

In theory when they bring in the 4 bin rule (2028 here) we should manage however, I suspect the reality will be different when you factor in things like birthdays, parties, Xmas, delayed or missed collections etc.

The Council here once refused to empty my garden waste bin, for which I pay an additional £80 per year, because I had put some rotten apples from the tree in the garden in it. This was before they started collecting food waste and obviously they wouldn’t have fitted in the tiny food waste bin anyway. So presumably they wanted this compostable garden waste to go the landfill?

They then said “no edible plants” can go in the garden waste. So presumably no nettles, no rose petals, no vegetables people have grown, no offcuts from herb bushes, no dandelions, no bay leaves, no pine needles, etc!

Absolutely crazy. How does the arbitrary fact that a particular plant happens to be edible by humans make it less compostable?

And are we meant to believe that Serco’s refuse collection staff have the botanical knowledge to determine which plants are edible and which are not?!

They seem to deliberately make it impossible for people. If we want littering and flytipping to reduce then they should be providing ample bin space and collecting far more frequently to make it easier for people.

I recycle as much as I can and my general waste bin isn’t full fortnightly ( family of five). My council are pretty good and recycle soft / hard plastics. I take glass to bottle bank. Food waste / peelings goes in brown bin.

I do remember when dc were small and I had three in nappies (toddler and twins) and bin was constantly overflowing. I got an extra bin provided. I think in that situation council should provide an extra bin / do an extra pick up. When I worked for council you could apply to go on to weekly collection. Mainly for people who would struggle to move a full bin but also if you had excess waste due to medical needs or young children and there was no room for extra bins.

Our council is doing a trial of collecting soft plastics in one part of the county. It has been an outstanding success, with them collecting far more than they anticipated. The rest of us are looking forward to them expanding the service - it’s surprising how much of our waste is soft plastics. I take them with me to the supermarket atm but having it collected will be great!

For those with too much waste of any kind, looking at what you’re buying can make a big difference for not a lot of change. Buying bigger options gives relatively a lot less waste than a higher number of smaller ones. Buying loose fruit and veg has lots less packaging than pre packed options.

They really need to rethink not allowing pedestrians to use the recycling centre. It's absurd that people who do not or who cannot drive are not permitted.

Once drivers are inside the site they are walking around so citing health and safety is nonsense.

Not all Councils offer this service. Ours is telling people to put sanitary and soiled medical items, dog and cat poo, dirty nappies etc into general waste then only collecting it every 3 weeks.

As I said near the start of the thread this is extremely unsanitary and will smell foul, especially in summer. The life cycle of a fly is 2 weeks so 3 weekly collections will result in maggots and thousands of flies in residential areas.

Most civilised countries collect waste daily. In some cases, twice per day.

It's wild that people are expected to pay council tax for such an appalling lack of service. That's unsanitary and what if someone's on holiday when the collection happens?

We're on twice a week collections for both rubbish and recycling.

For those who don't have food waste collection. You will soon. Made a huge difference to us. What can be recycled goes up before black bin collection goes down.

You'd hope so, wouldn't you. Yet for my council it looks like it'll be another 2 years at least till that happens - 2028!

Really?
In residential districts where there are houses rather than blocks of flats?

It really makes no sense at all.

FIL would never compost potato peelings because there was a risk of spreading potato blight, apparently.

Ours is fortnightly but if it moved to every 3 weeks we'd be stuffed. We're a family of 4 with 2 cats and 2 dogs. If you scoop/fully change cat litter the recommended amount that's a black bag a week on its own!