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.

I know that, would you believe It was choosy who missed what I meant by "living with garbage".

Well, we don't have rats, smells or flies, actually.

egg, midnight, tinier TBH my bokashi usually stinks when opened (but not when shut). But then I only put awful stuff in like bones, as I just compost all the vegetable matter. It doesn't seem to be a problem although they in theory aren't supposed to smell.

The stuff that comes out of the tap is HORRIBLE and stainy. Brilliant for plants though (about 2-3 tablespoons in a 5 litre watering can) or just pour it neat down the sink to keep it clear. Empty frequently, at least once a week, for the best pickling process.

You weren't being stupid . I also expected it to make beautiful compost but learnt over time that it didn't, but it's fab for the garden/compost bin. I had a bin that wouldn't start and I tipped in a well-pickled bin full and it got it going beautifully.

Ours have been fortnightly for months. One regular rubbish that can't be recycled and the other for food stuff. Works fine. Don't have any problem with smells or flies.

France is twice the size of Britain = more spaces to put landfill without people complaining about lots of lorries on roads near them.
And also less paranoid about energy from waste plants - trying to get one past planners and NIMBYs in the UK is a nightmare. OK in the long term we want to reduce waste but there's plenty to feed a EfW for the next 30-40 years even without harvesting landfill.

Our bins are only collected once a fortnight, have no probs, but we compost , dunno what impact that makes. We have a 60L bin, family of 6, no problems at all.

We've had that system for a couple of years.
All our black bit is used for now is DD's nappies really, after 2 weeks nothing else fits in. We regularly use next doors. (with permission).

Can you ask for bigger bins?

We too are on alternate fortnightly collections- landfill waste one week, recycling the next. The green waste bins are collected weekly but I haven't used mine for about two years- it just goes on the compost heap.
I have no problems with fortnightly collections- our black bin is rarely ful, all that goes in it are the kitchen bin contents and the animal leavings (dog bags, rabbit sweepings, cat litter). The recycling bin has a very broad content- even bagged clothes and shoes can go in- so is always full. If you put out extra recycling in boxes or clear bags they'll take it all- but if you put out extra rubbish next to your black bin they won't take it.

Seems like the general consensus is that fortnightly isn't a problem then?

Anyone here having genuine problems with fortnightly? I recall one person earlier in the thread but they were asked what they put into the bin but didn't answer. Maybe we can make suggestions as to how to help?

This isn't going to change, and it just can't. Therefore accepting it and doing everything possible to stop waste going to landfill makes sense all round.

I'm so going to miss the German system when we come back to the UK later this year. We have three bins: paper, food and normal bin. Ah, not forgetting the yellow bags that take all sorts of recycable materials. Normal bin gets picked up every two weeks and is usually only half full as I can recycle everything else. I wouldn't mind fortnightly collections in the UK IF I were able to recycle more...

where we live it's been happening for a few years now (fortnightly collection) and we manage most of the time - there are occasions in the year when you will have more rubbish so your bin will be fuller by the next fortnightly collection (Christmas being a good example!) but on the whole it's a system which has worked out well for most families as we have a blue bin too (paper mainly and plastic milk cartons etc) so you can put many used items in this bin to reduce the waste in the grey bin.

BTW We haven't had a problem with rats or mice.

Schnullerbacke, what can you recycle that we can't? Things have improved here an awful lot in recent years. Our recycling collection now takes plastic of all sorts (food trays, drink bottles, yogurt pots etc), glass, cans, paper and cardboard of all sorts (including tetrapaks), plus seprate collections for green garden waste if you need them. The only thing our council don't do is collect food waste separately, though I know of somethat do. They are aiming for 75% recycling by 2015, which I think is quite good, certainly way better than it was a few years ago. With that, and composting (incl Bokashi), there isn't actcually that much to put in the normal bin.

Perhaps you'll be pleasantly surprised!

Midnightexpress - we were in Kent 2 1/2 years ago and they hardly took any of the recycling we left out. They would only accept the plastic bottles, no fruit punnets or anything like that. Perhaps times have changed....

notcitrus - France is bigger than the UK, but space is still at a premium. My understanding is that waste is used in "Waste-to-Energy" plants here in France.

However (as I posted earlier) daily collection is not universal in France, & I bet you have no idea really where all the waste goes, cote

What is really unfortunate in the UK (at the moment at least) is that what is recyclable by the local authority varies so widely - that should be addressed nationally. (IMHO )

Of course, I don't know "where all the waste goes"

I'm just saying that waste-to-energy plants are quite popular here in France, whereas they haven't caught on that well in some other places like Canada, for example.

The French have a funny approach to such things. 80% of the country's electricity is generated in nuclear power plants.

Are they going to bring in more recycling too? They are under pressure to increase the % recycled so you may find a rush of boxes/bins/bags appearing

We have a compost "dalek" for kitchen scraps (the normal compost stuff not cooked waste), have not make much compost but been putting stuff in for about 3 years so it must be going somewhere

We have had this for a few years now and no real problem, occasionally (eg. Christmas) there is a bit of strain on the bin but usually you can buy extra "official" bin bags for 50p or something to help out.

cote "I'm just saying that waste-to-energy plants are quite popular here in France, whereas they haven't caught on that well in some other places like Canada, for example"

not that popular here either, again probably due mostly to reasons of space - incinerators of waste next to a densely populated area (as most of the UK is, apart from places like the Highlands, & who would want a waste incinerator in an AONB?) are deeply unpopular, as you would imagine.

France has a much larger land area & much smaller population density: 110 per sq km in France, 395 per sq.km. in England or pushing 4x that of France

Canada has masses of space however - maybe their reasons are different.

We have started since March, and it works fine for us. We recycle food waste,which collected every week.

thing is, there's no reason not to have a modern EfW plant next to a populated area - there's a huge one in Amsterdam, for example. But however much you explain that no, they aren't like the 1960s incinerators which really were just chucking your black bags in a furnace, and how they have to meet the 2003 Waste Incineration Directive requirements and clean the air that goes out of dioxins and other nasties, people especially in the UK go "OMG burning waste must be smelly and bad and poisoning the children!!11!!"... which is ironic when they live next to a main road. Objecting to noisy lorries trundling to and from recycling sorting plants is at least a valid point - but landfills round London are around 99% full now.

I think it's end 2010 when all England authorities are obliged to collect at least 3 types of waste for recycling from doorsteps, and the landfill tax also goes up for them, so there's probably a big push to collect more recycling this year. It's varied so widely round the country because there's little point in collecting stuff that can't be processed at all here and what are good ways to collect it vary depending on what sort of area you're in. But now there's a lot more places that refine the recycling into useful raw materials (glass cullet, plastic pellets etc) for manufacturing, which usually means exporting.

I think it's obvious what my job was a couple years ago...