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.

CarGirl, its in the surrey herald. also on their website.to be phased in by next year, i think. i am sure they are not collecting food though.

I have to totally agree with fruitloaf - reducing is the key. We have just stopped buying so much stuff and buying things without packaging where possible. It has made a huge difference. And saved us money. We plan what we will eat and buy just that.

It has done us a huge favour.

I do hate the idea of fortnightly collections but in that way it has helped us.

As well as reducing, the other key things we have found have been to buy wheelie bin liners to line the outside bin, and to double bag the kitchen bin at all times. No double bagging = maggots, ime

(so yes, increase in bin bag consumption!)

We have fortnightly collections.

Black bin - every other week

blue bin (glass and plastic) and brown bin (food waste, garden waste, cardboard) every other week, along with paper.

It's not a problem. We recycle everything so our black bin is never anywhere near full (5 people in house) and I have never been aware of a problem with rats, maggots or smells.

I agree with some others, what is all this rubbish? really the only thing we don't recycle (tho admittedly no nappies here now!) is thin plastic from the top of eg supermarket meat packages, and a few bits of adulterate crafty things that can't go as cardboard.

Just looked in my kitchen bin which I empty twice a week and that's about all there is there, yup.

we have tow weekly bin collection - plus 3 children ... it can be done

We have 4 weekly bin/box collection (all collected separately) and 1 fortnightly collection.

Food waste, glass, paper, plastic and tin are collected weekly.

Anything that cannot be recycled fortnightly.

If a piece of paper blows into the glass box, they wont empty it, 'its contaminated' But when i offered them £10 to take away rubbish when i first moved in they were happy to throw everything in together!

I love unpacking things in the shop, it get's them all flappy as you're holding everyone up and best of all creating a pile of rubbish at the till.

It's also quite entertaining to put all your fruit and veg loose in a big pile and wait for the tutting to start in the queue behind you.

I live a simple life.

Fortnightly collections have been a way of life for a couple of years with me now.

Have never had any problems. Ever. In fact if we have forgotten to put the bin out ever, we've been able to stretch it out to a mmonthly collection !

I compost, use reuseable nappies and think carefully about the packaging when I buy things. I've never thought about leaving the packaging behind in the shop... but thats my next move to reduce our rubbish.

Tbh, this enforcement may make you think about how you can improve your situation.

I think leaving rubbish in the shop is a brilliant idea. No clearer way of telling the supermarkets "We don't need your packaging, you are over doing it!"

Also fortnightly here. Esp bad when I had three children in nappies incl newborn twins so about a gazillion nappies a day. Tried very hard to get an extra bin from council but they said I needed to have an extra child or a lodger to qualify.

Thankfully lovely next door neighbours (who are just a couple with grown up children who have moved out) let us put one of our bags in their bin each fortnight which means we can just get it all taken away each week.

If there are any bags that wont fit in they don't take them.

Also they will not take glass or any type of plastic except bottles in the recycling. Or gift wrap.

We've had this for years. Our bin is just about full when it comes to be collected - you have to squash it down a bit! And I used disposables (always put poo down the loo but that's what you're supposed to do anyway!).

They also collect bottles, tins, plastic bottles, paper. We take cardboard to the recycling place.

Family across the road with 6 kids also manages on this system.

It focuses the mind on what you chuck in it. Never put say an empty margarine tub in without first having crammed it full of other rubbish! And I don't buy food with excessive packaging either. Wish our council collected food waste though. Can't have a compost bin as garden far too small and there is already a rat problem in my area.

Rubbish wasn't collected daily at our holiday house in France last year - was still more frequent than here, but not daily

recycling twice-weekly (tins, plastic, cardboard)
waste weekly
glass not at all (but there are are big glass recycling containers in every neighbourhood)

& the "clean" streets of France are full of dogshit - much worse than here IME

Minthumbug, i'm extremely far from perfect with recycling, but just one thing - if your family is routinely leaving half their food on the plates... how about trying giving them smaller portions?

don't really see a problem with fortnightly tbh but i moved here from a fortnightly area and it didn't seem to be an issue.

Still have weekly collections in Lambeth but even with using disposable nappies at night we only have 1-2 smallish bags a week (plus granny-flat tenant has about 1/2 a bag for our bin).
2-4 bags of recycling though, more bags as I put the recycling outside ASAP before ds plays with it...

We'll probably go to fortnightly soon though, which shouldn't be too much of a problem as paper, card, glass, cans and plastic bottles can all go in our recycling bags. Might be an issue though for the flats round the corner who only get one wheelie bin for the whole building (houses divided into 4 flats).

Local Sainsburys are piloting 'any plastic packaging' recycling, which with my compost caddy gets me down to even less waste (meat scraps and a few nappies, really)

Those of you who say you compost all food waste, are you talking about cooked food and meat as well? I thought you shouldn't compost that as it attracted vermin?

I had a bokashi bin but it kept leaking...

Ours is already fortnighly so it is obvious that it is an exercise in reducing cost and not good for the environment because the result is HUGE queues at the local dump on the weekend. The council should give me a refund for the service for which I am paying but they are not providing.

tinierclanger our council now collects cooked/protein food waste. i presume for an enormous wormery somewhere (must find out )

YABU. We have fortnightly collections (1 week regular, one week recycling, so they come every week). Recycling is plastic, paper, card and cans and we have a seprate glass bin that is collected once a month. Anything bulk, including garden waste goes in separate bags and you have to arrange a separate pickup. I was horrified to learn it was fortnightly when we moved here, but in fact it's fine. There's always plenty of space in the bins. I compost all raw veg waste and corrugated card and Bokashi in the summer for all the other food waste (I don't bother in the winter because it wouldn't break down fast enough in the compost bins). If you don't need it yourself, I'm sure that any gardening neighbours would bite your hand off for some lovely fresh compost (I would!).

I think the key thing is that people need to really put pressue on supermarkets to eliminate unnecessary packaging. There is soooo much waste involved, even with recent improvements. Don't take a plastic bag if you're only buying one or two of something like oranges or cabbages, don't buy things with extra packaging, take unnecessary stuff off and leave it at the checkout and so on. I notice that our local Sainsbos has a bin by the magazines where you can dump all the inserts that you don't want before you purchase.

yea we have this too it really sucks i am lucky to have an open fire so i can burn a lot of my rubbish but even so i am still overfilling my bin every fortnight!!!!!!!

Councils often have industrial composters which work at higher temperatures and therefore kill off any problems in cooked food waste in the composting process. I think.

We get collected:

• Paper/cardboard (full sized wheelie) fortnightly
• Garden waste (full sized wheelie) fortnightly
• Tins and plastic bottles (plastic crate but we can have more than one of them) fortnightly
• Regular waste (full sized wheelie) fortnightly

We compost anything possible to compost (understanding this isn't possible for everyone). We bokashi things which can't be directly composted which really helps.

We save our number 4 and number 2 plastic sheet waste and send it here but I do this through work and save it in a box by my desk and use the work carrier to send it in big batches.

But mostly, we chose to buy things with as little packaging as possible. For instance, when we buy loose fruit and veg we don't put them in bags, and choose plastic bottles over tetrapacks so we can recycle them.

The only reason you'll get smelly stuff is degradable waste so if it's possible to compost that solves that, mostly. A doggie loo in the garden gets rid of cat or dog waste (if you've space). Animal bones we just pop into a plastic bag, or we bokashi fish bones.

We were worried when we first went to fortnightly (this was years ago). We actually have no probs whatsoever. We live in the country but no rats, no maggots etc and we now only fill our waste bin about 1/3 full every fortnight.

What are you actually filling your bin with? I may be able to suggest what to do with it.

tinier your bokashi was faulty if it leaked. But try tightening the tap - I had this problem at first and I'd not tightening the tap properly. Meaning, not the turning part but when you get the bin you screw the tap into the bucket, and that wasn't on tight enough on mine.

tinier my bokashi bins never worked. They didn't leak but they never composted properly. The first time I thought it was because they were too close to the kitchen radiator so got too warm, but I tried a second time (had two bins each time) and they just remained as mouldy stinking food for months, with blue mould instead of just white, and I had to dump the whole festering lot at the end of the garden where it eventually decomposed.

Biggest waste of money for 2008 for me I think!

egg bokashis aren't supposed to make compost. They're a pre-compost maker, to convert non-compostable stuff into compostable stuff, and it doesn't tend to look much different after being pickled!

Just make sure you use plenty of bran and empty the tap frequently and it will be fine. Leave it for 3-4 weeks when full, then dig into the garden (deep) or pop into the compost bin.