Question about your rubbish collections- how is it for you?

[nowwearefour]

Do you have weekly or fortnightly collections? If you could choose between the current arrangement of weekly rubbish collection and a weekly limited recycling collection but an increase in council tax to pay for this service or a fortnightly amazing recycling (taking tetrapack, most plastics and card/ paper etc) with big green wheelie bins to store it all in, fornightly food collection and fortnightly rest of the rubbish collection but no increase to council tax, which would you choose?

[Paschaelina]

Old-skool here. No recycling, no separate collections, just rubbish once a week. We choose to take our glass, paper and cardboard and tins to local recycling bins.

I would love a wheelie bin collection, we're not allowed wheelies as the dustcarts locally don't have the mechanism for them.

[notcitrus]

AMuminScotland - it depends what happens to the recycling. If it gets taken to a low-tech separation centre and is sorted by hand, they may get more money for the well-sorted paper/card and plastic and metal (and if there's no automated facility nearby they have no choice), and in that case it would be a danger to the workers to include glass.

However more Materials Reclamation Facilties (MRFs) are being built which are mainly automated, soaking stuff so plastic floats off, using magnets and electrostatic to remove metal cans etc, and soggy paper/card is separated from glass by centrifuging. More upfront cost but cheap to run, separation quality hasn't always been so good but is getting better, and can include glass.

Not sure about Scotland but all English authorities had to provide doorstep collection for 3 different types of recycling minimum a few years ago, and went for different ones depending on what facilities existed/were being built nearby, so you get all this variation by area which is slowly getting more standardised.

[dizzyday07]

Week 1 - Black wheelie bin for general waste. (normally just 1 bin bag per week inside!)

Week 2 - Green wheelie bin for garden waste (no food), red box for glass/cans, Blue box for paper, Blue bag for cardboard, Orange net for plastics. We can put out textiles too.

I have to take tetrapak to the local household recycling centre place and we have a compost bin for veg waste.

[popelloucla]

Black wheelie bin for general waste - weekly.
Green wheelie bin for garden waste - four weekly.
Blue box for paper and cardboard - fortnightly.
Blue wheelie bin for plastics and glass - fortnightly.
But, if you want you can put paper in the blue bin and glass and plastic in the blue box as long as you don't mix them.
I would love to be able to recycle food waste, but on the whole am satisfied.

[bruffin]

General rubbish - purple bag every week usually manage with just one bag

recycling is alternate weeks
glass, paper in green box and plastic and tins in black box on one week, followed by green wheely bin with cardboard, foodwaste, green waste the next week

[ChunkyPickle]

5 bins for various things taking up enough room to park a motorbike (ask me how I know), all collected on a pain to remember of a fortnightly schedule.

We get maggots, it smells, we keep it right at one end and still get swarmed with flies in the summer (far, far more than with weekly collections), next door got rats, and I've seen some kind of rodent hanging around our bins too.

I greatly preferred living in an area with weekly collection from binbags (so no huge plastic containers to store in my garden), where I chose what and how to recycle, and everything went to an incinerator which fed the grid (so no landfill).

[Fuzzywuzzywozabear]

Ours is fab

Normal rubbish weekly

All Recycling (Inc food) weekly

Glass fortnightly

I'm not complaining!

[silverfrog]

ours is quite good.

have weekly household rubbish, and weekly paper/card and plastics/glass.

our binmen are fab, and we dont get any "if it's not in the bin, it's not getting taken away" nonsense, so if we have an overflowing paper box, for eg, we can just pile up extra and it all gets taken. and they collect bins form by the house, and put bins back nicely as well - a truly fab service.

I wish we had a metal can collection, though, and food waste (I would compost this myself, but we are in rented, and so can't take over part of the garden easily)

[ivykaty44]

fortnightly rubbish collection


fortnightly:

glass
cardboard
plastic
paper
garden waste
food waste
clothes &shoes
batteries
tin

I put my recycling out every month and I put my rubbish bin out every month
my green & food waste is always left to be collected every fortnight

[oldsilver]

Nope, would not be happy to pay more for weekly collection - would be happy to have to pay less for monthly general waste collection. We recycle everything we can (recycling weekly). Find it doesn't smell as that is mainly foodwaste which is collected weekly with cardboard - no maggots either...yet. And even that is half empty as all non cooked vegetable waste, teabags etc goes on my compost heap.

The dusties don't empty our bin properly anyway - they just take out the one, half filled black sack manually

[Calabria]

Fortnightly collections here.
Brown wheelie bin for garden waste only
Blue half size wheelie bin for paper, card, tetrapaks
Grey wheelie bin for everything else except glass, plastic (1 and 2 only) and metal which have to be taken to the recycling centre ourselves.

I wouldn't be happy to pay extra for weekly collections. Not necessary in our case, I'm anal about recycling and the nearest centre is a two minute walk from the house.

[Doilooklikeatourist]

Fortnightly - up to 4 black sacks general rubbish
Fortnightly - blue sacks of recyclable , but no glass
Weekly - food waste
Garden waste - there is an additional charge
Would love wheely bins , as live in rural area and sacks are often ripped by foxes or crows .
Pay enough council tax already thank you

[echt]

Oz has it sorted, I think, though I allow it's a long way to come just to get your rubbish collected.:o

One big blue wheelie for all recycling. Collected fortnightly.
One moderate red-topped green wheelie for garden stuff. Ditto.
One smaller green one for general rubbish. Collected weekly.
The collections never fail, even on Christmas Eve.

We have a wormery for all the general peelings, etc.

Twice a year there is hard rubbish collection, where you put out your mattresses, old computers, flower pots, tvs, etc. etc. on to the nature strip, and it's all taken away by the council. That's unless it's been taken by hard rubbish surfers.

It's an excellent system, and probably accounts for the relative lack of fly-tipping in Melbourne.

Also it works because most Melbourne houses have a driveway, and somewhere to conceal the wheelies.

[FagAshLill]

POPELL - same here (I think we live in the same area) I would love to put food waste into the green bin as it decomposes anyway - and the fact we cant is a huge bugbear to me.

[alemci]

black bag and recycling weekly. we are lucky

[lovingthepeaceandquiet]

Our general rubbish gets taken weekly, but we could manage with fortnightly.

We have a burgendy wheely bin, which get collected fortnughtly, for card, paper, glas, plastic and tins. This is quite a new thing for us and it's brilliant! We are recycling FAR more, hence why we could easily go to fortnightly general rubbish collections. Actually we could do with the recycling being taken weekly instead.

The we have a green wheely bin for garden waste which gets collected fortnightly.

[nowwearefour]

this is all v interesting. thanks. quite good that so many of you have fortnightly collections and are happy with it

[twotesttickles]

fortnightly rotation, garden waste, paper, card, plastics one week, land fill the next. I really wish they'd take glass but apparently they can't because of elfansafetyluv whatever that is