tell me about your council and it's non collection of open lid/ extra bags please

[grumpypants]

Council have just introduced fortnightly alternate recycling/ black bag waste collection plus weekly food bin collection. Today, extra black sacks not collected. Anyone else have this? Now I have to drive to the local waste site (v ecofriendly ) and I am obviously not alone - on the walk to school several bins had open lids/ extra bags.

bump - this is research for my snotty letter!

Yes we have it, but it depends how twatty the bin men are feeling that week as to whether they follow it. Sometimes they leave them, sometimes they don't. You can be fined for leaving extra bags too often. DH often wanders up and down the alley on bin night with extra bags looking for space in the neighbours bins. Lots of people do. Luckily we have two bins as they forgot to collect the single persons bin that was already in our property when we ordered a family bin.

We don't have a weekly food bin collection. We don't have a food bin. It goes in with the normal waste. If I ahd a garden I'd have a bin for food and garden waste, but I don't, so it has to go in the green bin with normal waste. Oh how I love spending summer evenings throwing boiling water over maggots

bleurgh. i just don't see how it is better for the environment to make people do extra car journeys.

Ours tend to collect extra bags no problem. Looking at the stuff my neighbours leave out Which annoys me perversely because it means I am struggling to cut down my waste for no GOOD REASON when everyone else is busy filling up landfill in my place.

But we do have a weekly food waste and recycling collection.

I know that round the school that DS2 goes too there is often waste left behind becuse they don't have wheely bins and people use that as an excuse to throw out 10 bin bags

Blimey. We are not up to 10, but sometimes can reach 2 extra bags (nappy heavy, pet litter, birthday party detritus etc). I just don't see how it helps to force extra car journeys or fly tipping?

we have fortnightly collections, have done so for several years now

we have one dc in nappies full time, cats with a litter tray, dd3's birthday party was this past weekend and our black bin is about half full and due to be collected tomorrow. We'd have less to throw if I bothered composting (no food collection here)

how can you be making so much rubbish?

I think the point isn't to force extra journeys or fly-tipping but to force the householder to reduce his/her waste. Litter could be composted maybe, party waste is made of of lots of paper and card so could be recycled. I agree it's not ideal but it's a start.

You cant recycle wrapping paper [apparently]

We have fortnightly refuse and recycling, but the council doesn't provide free wheely bins so there are various sizes of bins on our street. We sometimes have extra bin bags and they take them no problem. Can't believe people would get fined - surely refuse collection is a service you are paying your council tax for!!

Our binmen take no extra waste and won't take the bin itself if the lid isn't fully closed.
We have had fortnightly collections for years so used to it now but wouldn't manage if we didn't take all plastic (no recycling plastic via binmen) and clothes/fabrics to the supermarket recycling bins.
We have a black bin for non recyclables, green bin for cardboard, peelings and ashes, blue box (x2) for cans, tins and glass and sacks for papers.
We are supposedly going to get another bin to replace the boxes and something for food waste as well this summer. Not sure where I am supposed to put all these bins and really worried about attracting rats with the food waste option.

We are a family of four with guinea pigs whose huge indoor cage is changed every five days or so. We also have fortnightly bin collections and weekly recyclables collections (including food).

We never fill our wheelie bin.

It makes me cross that people are still chucking out more than a large wheelie bin's worth of waster per fortnight.

They've just started to collect cardboard here, but only if it fits inside the designated box. I noticed today after the men had been, that some houses still had a cardboard box left behind, which I presume they had put alongside the official plastic bin. Of course it is peeing with rain, (always does on recycling day), so now they are left with a load of soggy cardboard. No doubt, next time they will squeeze any spare cardboard into the ordinary "rubbish" bin.

We have the same set up - and absolute zero-tolerance of extra bags or even if your lid doesn't quite close, they'll leave it.

But you get used to it surprisingly quickly - it does focus your mind re recycling and now our general waste bin is only just full after a fortnight. We also have a brown bin for garden waste and straw/hay from cleaning out animals can go in there.

We're a family of 4 and usually roughly half fill our black wheelie bin in a fortnight - everything else is recycled or composted. Obviously there's more on occasions like birthdays and Christmas but it's never been a problem. It does take a bit of effort but you soon get used to it. If you're caught putting waste in a neighbour's bin you can get a fixed penalty for fly tipping (£60 here I live).

bibbity - maybe if our council recycled more we wouldn't fill our bin. Our council have a mahossive list of things they cannot/will not recycle and I don't drive, so driving my recycling elsewhere is not an option.

I must admit that our wheely bin (4 people, 1 cat) is rarely more than half full. Very occasionally, if I have something big a want to throw out, I have to hold it back until a fortnight when the bin is not that full (like loads of non-recyclable polystyrene block we had at Christmas time).

What are you throwing out OP, if you are ALWAYS over the 1-bin limit? Are any of your neighbours regularly under? I would be happy for someone to put extra waste in our bin if need be.

ours are collected weekly 3 black bags each household regardless of family size, they recycle card, plastic and tin but not glass, out council says wrap glass in paper and throw it in the bin!! if you have over 3 bags or if bags are heavy they wont take them

i hate all this 'we don't fill ours so you shouldn't'

the council should take black bin rubbish away every week - we have a rat problem that will reach epidemic proportions soon (i heard it on radio 4 so much be true)

Hassled
I wondered if that was the case with animal sawdust and straw. We have a garden waste bin that you also put food scraps in in compostable bags. Trouble is, I wouldn't want to put my guinea pig cage stuff in the bin without wrapping it first and I don't know if you can get large compostable bags. What do you do?

stop throwing away so much crap then
(she says helpfully :) )

We have fortnightly collection of grey wheely bin (no extra bags, lid must close), and blue recycling wheely bin (cans, plastic bottles, paper, cardboard), plus on the opposite weeks brown wheely bin (garden compostable stuff, no food waste).

we can get extra blue and brown bins for free, but you have to pay (about £50) for an extra grey bin. We did when we first moved in (before the recycling started) but we rarely have to use it now, only when we have a big clear-out.

I think they want people to feel the pain of the rubbish they generate, rather than making it easy for you to shove it in the bin and not think about it.

Zero tolerance for extra bags or unclosable bins here too - fortnightly wheely bin collections, weekly food waste & recycling collections. There are lots of student houses round here which aren't good at dealing with rubbish, so there are regularly bins left unemptied because they were too full, or recycling crates left full of unrecyclable rubbish.

They don't yet do kerbside collections of plastic for recycling, which is the biggest nuisance, but luckily most of the supermarkets have plastic recycling in the carpark, so I put a couple of bags worth of milk bottles etc every couple of weeks when I do a big shop.

You just have to get into the habit of recycling as much as possible (which is the whole point, of course), and if necessary trying to compact the rubbish before you put it in the wheely bin (stamp/sit on it). I find I only fill the wheely bin if I've been having a major declutter or a party.

Ours won't collect anything extra, and won't move your bin if the lid isn't completely closed. They won't step onto your property to collect the bin either, so when my elderly neighbour left her bin about a meter away from her boundary, they left it (but did have to come back when she gave the council merry hell on the phone ).

We have to telephone in advance and pay a fee, £3 a bag IIRC, if we want extra bags collected. They won;t collect open bins, or those they deem to be over full either.

Sawdust does go in the compost bin now, and it's been easier since they started taking food waste. We usually manage (6 plus a cat and a gerbil) but occasionally shove stuff in otehr people's bins 9lots of lone residents here) after they go to work, or drive to tip- about 7 miles.

BTW, OP, how many children in nappies do you have? Round here I think the council does sometimes issue larger or extra bins for large families or people with two or more in nappies at once (opposite neighbours with twins had an extra bin when they were little, I think). Might be worth calling to ask about.