have we had an argument about rubbish yet?

[peskipixie]

i dont understand how people cant get by with one wheeliebin. we have recently gone to fortnightly collections and people are frequently dumping black bags on the alley on the wrong day, its disgusting. but why is it necessary? we have recycling boxes, they will take as much recycling as we leave out, just not rubbish. there are 6 of us in our house and we manage fine. i honestly dont get why its such a problem.

anyone want to enlighten me?

Same here. I recycle everything that I can and mostly only put out my bin every fortnight, even though we have weekly collections, because it is never more than about half-full.

there isn't an argument to be had. we need to reduce the 1 ton per family per annum household waste travesty. if that means one wheelie bin so be it. if that doesn't work and we need to be taxed on our rubbish so be it. carrot/stick whatever, we all need to recycle more, not buy things in loads of packaging or make like the germans and leave it in the supermarket (love that).

I agree - hardly have any rubbish maybe one small binbag a week.

There is now talk of charging for all rubbish to be taken away - which IMHO will cause all sorts of problems, 1 being flytipping which is bad enough and the 2nd being whats to stop nextdoor putting their rubsih in my bin whilst it's out on the street waiting to be collected.

Okay, overall I agree with you all and I personally don't create lots of waste (so I would agree wouldn't I? )

BUT, there are people who live in flats or don't have gardens and who have no room for recycling bins and who have titchy kitchens. So before we introduce this sort of thing we need some provision for them.

Also, let's not be naive here, the cost of rubbish disposal will go up even if the level of recycling goes up - do you really think recyclables will be collected gratis for ever? So we may end up paying more for less service.

Finally, in my area they are experimenting with allowing food waste to go in the garden waste/compost bin - which is a bloody waste as we have an enormous compost heap which we uses instead but I reckon this is going to need to be rolled out first because I think for most people, chucking away food (perfectly good food gah - don't get me started) creates the majority of their landfill waste.

We recycle everything we can.

5 in the household, fortnightly collections. We struggle massively to stick to one wheelie a fortnight.

I will be hugely pissed off if my council start charging for bin collections. My council tax is horrific as it is. To add charges on top for waste collection (which is already included in our council tax) is taking the piss.

my bins are always full, i have to flatten bags down to get more in and use room in my dad's. all bins are full

our green recycling wheelie is full to overflowing too by the time the fortnightly collection comes around.

NomDeBroomstick - if you have five in your household you are entitled to a bigger bin (did you know that???) You have to ask though.

You can also get a big metal thing to compact your waste (quite good for taking your frustrations out apparently!)

My council tax is now over £300 a month! so I sympathise.

However my farking council can still afford £64K to put christmas lights up

No we're not. It has to be 6 in my area

mine is £350pm.

thieving gits

Blimey NomDeBroomstick - that stinks! Would you like me to move in to make up the numbers?

By my calculations that's £70 per person, per month in your house? You must have a lot of streetlights or something

nope, our council services are shite . All I can say is that they must have v posh biscuits at their meetings in County Hall

The whoel thing riles me beyond belief

lol @ you moving in !

yes, we struggle and we compost and recycle more than the council make provision for, too.

It's the nappies for us.

I'd like to see more details on what councils have in mind. We are a household of 8, so obviously we generate more rubbish than a household of 3 or 4.

This week, I have put out 1.5 large wheelie bins, but that was largely because we did major clearing out last week. Normally, we are loosely filling one wheelie bin. I put out two recycling bins, filled to the brim, but that's because I forgot for two weeks. I have a large toybox (the kind with roped handles, iykwim) where I keep my recyclable bottles (we have to take them for recycling, as there is no kerbside service). I compost everything compostable.

If we have to have less chuckable rubbish, then it will be a step back developmentwise for us.

the other stuff like old electrical items are hard to get rid of. the queues at the tip are crazy now. it's also so user-unfriendly.

you can recycle anything there, but have to queue for ages, it's too small, sure our council could afford a bigger dump

whomovedmychocolate - why won't recyclables be collected gratis forever? arguably there is a cost now in that the money comes out of council tax, but why would it be any different? why is it "naive" to think that?

I think a charge for excess rubbish is perfectly fair, although they should probably make provision for larger households. But they should also bring in a new tax that would make businesses pay for rubbish they inflict on households - perhaps a higher rate of vat on foods that come in packages where the packaging weighs more than 10% of the food or something like that (and I don't care if it's recyclable).

Food packaging is ridiculous.

They should be targeting the manufacturers/producers of this stuff and punishing THEM.

Just like the govt should be punishing heavy industry for CO2 emmissions rather than kicking the general public to death over it.

I have to say though, our local tips are VERY user friendly, they have recently had an overhaul and are much better than they used to be.

i think charging for collecting rubbish is an awful idea. our bins are always full, i have 2 children in nappies. i do recycel, but i don't compost because i have a tiny patio outside so what would i use the compost for? my dad lives in a flat and they tried to get rid of his weekly bin collections, but where is he supposed to keep his recycling boxes? in his front room? also how can they monitor who puts what into the communal bin.

i think the responsibility lies with businesses to use less packaging and make the packaging they do use recyclable. i pay for rubbish collection in my extortionate council tax and i don't think i should have to pay for it again.

Food packaging is not ridiculous and not totally at the fault of the manufacturers.

There is no point in having food that arrives damaged and rotting. The point of produce packaging is to protect the food. For much packaging, it's because it's what the consumer demands.

The EU is actually pretty strict about excess packaging, fore example, having wide packaging so that it has shelf presence - you can't do that anymore.

SenoraGruesomeCatastrophe - I like your idea of charging packaging/food companies.

In answer to the recyclables thing. Right now, here we have to take glass to the bottle bank ourselves - ours is only a mile away so we walk and carry it (excellent exercise and stops us being complete lushes!)

This is because glass recycling is covered by our district council (for the county), and paper by our local council (for the town). Currently the former is paid for apparently by central govt and does not form part of our council tax.

However this may change because it's less cost effective theses days as the cost of moving the glass and melting it down has gone up and the value of the recycled glass has gone down (still with me - this is very dull).

Similarly the cost of recycling paper and card and plastic has gone up - simply put our recycling facilities can't cope with the amount we are recycling so we have to export it (or in some cases just ship it to Asia to be dumped ).

We have had our rubbish collected fortnightly now for two years to 'encourage recycling' and have the refuse collection broken down in our council tax bill. This has gone up 12% year on year and unsurprisingly, increased following the introduction of collection of garden waste in the third bin (it's like bin city round here - we have three bins, plus four boxes, mostly empty). by an extra 5%.

So here, we are paying to recycle, and obviously it's not free. Someone has to pay to take the stuff away and stick it on that ship to the Philippines to create a pollution issue over there (sorry to be flippant but it just makes me mad ). That someone will ultimately be the council tax payer, and those costs will have to be passed back as it gets more expensive to deal with both recyclable and unrecyclable waste. IMHO obviously, I'm just an armchair economist

Personally I think it we all stopped buying so much crap, we'd cut the problem down considerably. Apparently a third of all food is thrown away in this country! That's a hell of a lot of wheelie bins full!

i have only started recycling 'seriously' recently. yesterday i put two small black bags out for our weekly collection (we dont have wheely bins). one thing i have noticed, is that although the recycling centre takes plastic, card, glass etc, there is so much plastic they dont take which is binned. I bought a twin pack of sweetcorn yesterday as none loose in tesco. the plastic tray isnt recyclable. so its been binned. i do compost as well. tesco had those 3 section bins down to £15 a few weeks ago. but need to invest in more storage. council only collects paper and glass.

how many bags can a wheely bin take? there are five of use in this house.

remind me on thursday to put my brown bin out for garden waste please lol.

We have our rubbish collected once every two weeks, our re-cyclables once every two weeks,and garden waste/ compostables once every two weeks.

It is fine for us, and we seldom put out extra bags

Out recycling bin is great, you don't have to sory the stuff out, they do that at the plant for you. Our area has very high reclycling rates

We have more than halved our rubbish output since the scheme started, and there is no problem with rats/ smell etc as the wheely binds are very heavy duty plastic, so foxes/ cats/ rats can't get into the waste

i want a wheely bin [sulk] am fed up of smelly bin cupboard, which could be used for soemthing else.

I see what you mean. I suppose I assumed you meant that recycling might not be free when rubbish collection is, which is highly unlikely.