Can you fit a fortnight's worth of rubbish in a small wheelie bin?

[Loobeeloo]

I have 3 under 3 in my house as well as dh and now we are recycling we have managed to reduce our rubbish down to 4 bags a week.

The larger wheelie bins hold 4-6 bags I'm told (the council won't take them if the lids won't close fully) but I now see there are suggestions we will all get half size bins to avoid "bin envy"!

wheelie bins

How on earth will I get my rubbish down to just 3 bags a fortnight?

our local recycling place is now taking drinks cartons, so that is a lot of extra
i veyr much doubtwe could fit into a small wheelie bin, even though we dont fill the normal bin fortnightly. how absurd.

I use my kids to compact the rubbish too if I forget to take it out.

I can sometime go four weeks with a normal sized wheely.

I try to recycle as much as I can including plastic bottles and bags/packaging, luckly the skip for them is just accross to road as we don't get them collected.

I wish I knew how you had so little rubbish[puzzled]. We recycle everything we can, compost, waste disposal etc etc and we still fill our wheelie bin every fortnight. There's only 2 adults, one dd (4) and a dog. Heaven help us when we have visitors

in someplaces poeple with alrger famillies (6 members, a child in nappies = 2) will get extra bins- know thats running in one area of Wales certainly

We can do it actually, used to it now- 3 kids, one in nappies. have no idea how, thats Dh's area!

lady next door- her and her Dh have 2 bins, they just got another. Not sure how. They still shoce their crap in ours.

and I am puzzled as to how people have so much - lol.

Chasing, me too! (we are 2+2 - 1 in washables)Rarely more than 2/3 full.

Surely just giving people a larger bin does nothing to encourage recycling.

There are always people writing into our local paper to complain about fortnightly collections/full bins/maggots to which I'd like to make several points,

er hm

recycle more and make more effort it's your planet too (and to the person on her who mentioned taking the overs to municiple tip, ie landfill, the country is drowning in rubbish fgs - just make less)

As for the maggots - its a bin, not your dining table it is only a health hazard if you eat your dinner off it - or spend too much time staring in it to see if your maggots have hatched. If it bothers you greatly, wash it out, disinfect it and start using wheelie bin liners.

we don't even get bins, though they have said if they go to fortnightly rubbish collections (which they are trialing) then they might have to reconsider giving bins - rubbish lying about outside for two weeks in summer, not in bins - the mind boggles.

Peachy, we are a 6 member family with one in nappies until recently, and no composter, and we still managed with half a bin a fortnight.

The uk needs a much better recycling infrastructure.

lol at alycat on maggots.
to add my 2ps worth: maggots and flies are just a fact of life, you need nets on the windows to keep them out thats all.

I hoard yoghurt pots/magarine tubs/kitchen roll inserts/cardboard boxes for when my dd does craft work at home, or when the pile gets a bit tottery, I donate them to her school. They had a donation drive last year and I sent around 18 bags of material in about a month. But we do eat a lot of yoghurt in this house . We still generate too much rubbish for my liking though even with 3 recycling bins .

this would be a nightmare for us our recycling bin only gets collected once a month and is always jam packed, I have stuffed some of our recycling in a neighbours bin this morning (its collection day). I also compost all our veg waste, egg boxes etc. Our bin is almost full every week if we had a fortnightly collection or a smaller bin it would be a total nightmare. I can't honestly think what else I can do to reduce the amount of rubbish we produce.

oh and I get my veg from the organic man so no excess packaging and my milk is delivered so no milk bottles. Can't use re-usable nappies because DS absolutely loathed them (tried several types). Hmm, may have to get taller stronger DP to squash the rubbish

yes we could. there's me, dh and dd 14 months and in disposable nappies. our rubbish is currently weekly, we only put it out fortnightly, sometimes less than that. our recycling bin on the other hand is only collected fortnightly but we could fill it weekly. ours is an easy peasy system where you can put anything recycling in the green bin, no sorting.

ruddynorah - my mum has the same system as you. She just dumps everything in her recycling wheely bin, and they seem to take a lot more stuff than our council.
BUt I still can't work out why we create so much more rubbish than others I'm off to look through our bin to see if anything crept in that we could recycle....

There is no way we would manage on one small wheelie bin. We have 2 large black wheelies, and one large recycling wheelie. Each fortnight when they are emptied they are always crammed full! We where eligible for a 2nd bin as dd2 was still in nappies and we have dogs (with mess to clear). Thankgod! I always wonder how come we (family of 4 +2dogs) make soo much rubbish. My sister is maticulous (?sp) over her refuse, ie all the recycling is washed and compressed/crushed up small. The insides of her bins are washed and disinfected most weeks. I wouldnt dare go anywhere near the inside of my bins!
So, i think if i spent a little more time over what is dispose and how i dispose of it (crushing) would make more room in my bins, but i just dont have the extra time, i dont have enough hours in the day as it is.

alycat - HOW can you make less rubbish?? I already buy all my fruit and veg loose, I recycle what I can, how can I 'make' less rubbish? I buy products with the minimum packaging as it is! So don't fgs me, I had to take it to the tip, unless you wanted me to illigally fly tip it, or leave it lying around on the pavement until it got torn apart by foxes and scattered everywhere.

As I said, we normally do not fill our black wheelie bin. We are a family of 4 with a dog and a cat. On this one occasion I was having an unavoidable clearout. It had to go to the tip. Last time I looked that was what it was for. Unfortunate yes, but it had to go there. None of it was compostable/recyclable/reusable.

I would like a BBC reporter to fllow the trucks whick pick up the recycling and see where it really goes. If it gets to the point where it costs me money more money than I already pay them for collection (i.e. council tax) I shall start leaving my packaging at Tescos. Or perhaps on coucil properties. Don't they collect free from there? I wonder how I find out where the nearest council properties are? Oh, and where is my reduction in council tax to match the reduction in services?

I got a new bin delivered from the council this week. I looks exactly like the one I already have, except for the pretty council logo and it's green instead of grey. My bin cost about £50. So, how much did it cost them to buy and deliver these bins to the whole borough. Must have been expensive!

Once again, the government goes after the little guy thinking we're all so stupid we don't see that they're trying to protect the fat cats with a fence made of sticks.

Go after the manufacturers first before penalising John Doe.

it was rubbish day for us today- fortnightly collections and i'm pleased to say we had one and a half bin bags!

and 3 recycling bags (mostly paper as we have just cleared out the office!)

It can be done and i'm all for charging by volume instead of a set ammount included in council tax, it'd save me a fortune!!

It's infuriating isn't it expat?

My neighbour gives all her packaging to the checkout girl in Tesco. She unwraps everything as it is scanned and calmly hands it over.
I am not that brave! (pathetic but there you are)
The problem is, I am sure the cleaners in Tesco will just empty the check-out bin into a big bin - nothing will get sorted for recycling, so I don't think that approach is helpful.

So overpackaging goes on, and we are the ones who have no choice but to buy these products. (not everything has a 'lesser packed' alternative)
And then we get penalized with smaller bins / higher tax.
Aaargh, it makes me sooooo mad!!!

Oh, and re the maggots - our council advises you to double wrap all left over food in plastic bags. But I thought we are supposed to be reducing our plastic bag usage?? Plastic bags don't decompose, so all this food will sit in these bags for centuries.
But if you don't use plastic bags, and your bin gets infested with maggots, the council reserve the right not to collect your rubbish! Arrgh, talk about a nightmare!

We had maggots in our bin a few weeks ago. There was a bag at the bottom of the bin (which was properly closed when it was put there) that the bin men electednot to take. Ater a few weeks it was disgusting and covered with maggots. Yuk yuk yuk. You can bet I won't be cleaning that every two weeks. In fact probably never again. Shouldn't that be a man's job? Along with killing the spiders? EEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWW....

And what about these food compost ideas? Doesn't that stink up the back garden and attract pests? If so, no no no no and NO.

And then there's all the housing they're building these days.

With no gardens.

hippi - you can get compostable bin bags

and you can also get compost bins that are enclosed - so dont attract the pests