Council announced rubbish collection soon fortnightly, not weekly.

[Oblomov]

My bins will stink in the summer. my bins are already 3/4 full each week. how is this going to work ?
rats. amggots. what can i do to help myself. i don't want to run my rubbish to the skip. i pay huge council bills. why should i have to ?
They re-cycle weekly and collect rubbish weekly, two days later. currently thye only collect tins, botttles, newsapapers.
but i also collect plastic and cupbaord and take that to the re-cycling centre myself. no hassle/ so them collecting this from now on, is fine, but doesn't change much.
my bins will still be the same full, becasue i re-cycle as much as i can anyway. so if 3/4 full each week, they will be over flowing fortnightly, surely.
and why do they smell. what am, i doing wrong.

i am cross that the council are doing this. i am sure they are trying to encourage re-cycling. re-duce costs. but i already do alot.

No thanks, a gardener I will never be

We've just changed to this. But we have weekly recycling collection including food waste. Therefor bins don't stink - as there is nothing in there to stink. It works quite well so far. Not having to take plastic and card to the dump is great.

It also makes you think really hard about what you throw out as 5 people with one standard wheely bin can be a bit of a squeeze.

Fortnightly compostable waste alternating with fortnightly 'ordinary' waste here in wheely bins. I thought it would be revolting but not had a problem so far. No rats or maggots. I don't see how rats could get in the bins for a start.

Unsurewhattodonow, you can get elasticated nets to fit over the top of a recycling box to stop the contents blowing away - it might be worth checking with your local council to see if they are available in your area, or asking them to provide them if not - especially if they stipulate you have to put them roadside without the lid on.

Had this system for 6 years. never found it a problem .

Have now moved to a weekly area but often find its not worth putting bin out after only one week, as it only has one or two carrier bag fulls in .

3 of us plus assorted family guests for weekends.

I started a thread and moaned like hell a couple of months ago when my council went to fortnightly deliveries.

However they timed it to coincide with introducing brown bins to take all food waste.

So in practice it works well. All recycling goes in a box together and is collected weekly. All food waste in the brown bin collected weekly.

Black bin for domestic waste and green bin for garden waste collected on alternate weekends.

I don't think there will be maggots or rats in the bins because all the food is kept seperately.

I loathe and detest all the rinsig out of jars though, it is the most drudgy domestic job sorting out the recycling. But there you go.

If I had the energy I would start a rebellion as recommeded by Cote dazure

we have this system - I have never found it to be a problem.
They do increase it to weekly for about 8 weeks in the summer though, which helps even if you don't have a full bin, to cut down on stinkiness.
I do compost alot though - but then I am a gardener. No point composting stuff if you lived in a flat with no garden?

can see your predicament, but get over it, fortnightly collections have been the norm where i live for at least 8 years

hmm we have had this system for ages if I put my rubbish out only once a month the bin would still not be full and theres 4 of us. mind I do go to the tip nearly every week with the recycling. I cant understsand how some people manage to create large amounts of rubbish but i do have a lazy friend who seems to throw everything in the bin if the OH doesnt get to it first!

There are 5 of us and 2 using nappies - we have weekly collections but it alternates between recyclables and general waste, we also have a weekly compostables collection. We have our household waste bin cleaned fortnightly and we only had maggots when the household bin still had some food waste. We also recycle our glass at the supermarket bins.

The bins do get full but not overflowing, it makes you think about packaging, we have a milkman and weekly veg box which cuts down on packaging. We compost our peelings ourselves and cooked waste food is collected by council. So though it took a little while to adjust fortnightly collections provided the motivation to think about what we could do to reduce our waste - no bad thing!

However good you think you are you can always do better - not trying to be condescending as I refer to myself too, and I'm brilliant.

We've had fortnightly for years, too.

No problems for me personally as I have a garden and therefore I never put food waste in the bin (I bought a compost tumbler but the council offered green cones at massively reduced prices when they introduced the fortnightly collection). TBH I would be happy with monthly as that is about how long it takes to actually fill my bin (just 3 of us in the house).

The council collect paper, glass, tins and textiles but I need to add a monthly trip to the tip for carboard and plastics, which can be a bit of a pain.

Like others have said, it makes you think about packaging to start with etc but now it is second nature.

Obmolov do you have a big bin or a little bin because we never seem to fill ours???? We could do with a composter to get rid of food waste but don't really have anywhere to put hte compost so not sure how that would work?

I've not seen this announcement yet, where did you see it?

Also just remembered at Tesco in A they do tetra pack recycling! Plus there are recycling bins around ST for when all the ones at Tesco are full - cardboard, paper, plastic bottles, glass, alumium cans.

I've never found this a problem - the food waste is all composted so there is nothing left that would attract rats or maggots. I rinse any packaging with food left on it

You need to avoid disposable nappies though

We're a couple with 4 children who have packed lunches, eat at home every evening etc etc etc and seriously our big wheelie bin is often only half full week and that is without composting.

I'm not convinced by recycling being the enviromentally-friendly alternative. As others have said it would make far more semse to reduce packaging.

I use a bokashi bin for food waste which works well (or it did until the dog ate one of the bokashi bin taps...).

YABU - we've had this for three years, black one week, green the next, recycling once a fortnight.

A few maggots every now and then, certainly no rats.

YABU this is common practice as long as the week when normal waste isn't collected you get a recycle collection you'll be fine. In my area if you have (i think it's) 5 people living in your house you can have a bigger general waste bin.

YANBU if you only get a collection every 2 weeks without a recycle collection in between.

MuchAdoAboutNothingTiggaxx

Went fortnightly maybe 15 years ago in Cambridge? Here we have weekly, but tbh we probably only put out a black bag every 2 weeks anyway as we don't fill one in a week. I've never noticed any problems with smell.

I would say on average we generate one bag of recycling a fortnight (less in winter as we use card/paper to light the fire which only leaves the odd baked bean tin as they don't take any plastic except bottles)

Admittedly only 3 of us, and we have a dog who eats food scraps, but still.

Yanbu. We've had this for ages and our bin is overflowing and full of maggots/flies when the weather is warm. Yes we recycle. Apparantly if there was one more person in our household we would be permitted a larger bin

It's infuriating but there you go..something we have to pay for that delivers a rubbish (pardon the pun) service.

Going to the far East is mostly a good thing, actually. Most of our stuff is manufactured in the far east, so that's where they need lots of plastics and cardboard. If we don't send them recycled materials, they'll just go out and log virgin forests to make cardboard/get plastics from freshly drilled oil.

Big ships would be taking back overwhelmingly empty containers when they head East, if it weren't for the recyclable materials we are sending back.

Big thing is not to contaminate the recycling stream, that causes even more waste.

Many metals, all textiles and some paper are all processed in the UK, btw. Our household burns most our paper waste (which could also be composted if you don't like the idea of it going abroad).

Friend was today telling very funny story about her 1yo son getting into the wormery, she found him with his face covered by general kitchen organic waste... she doesn't think any worms were ingested.