Does anyone else ever have so much household rubbish that the lid of their wheelie bin doesn't close properly?

[saltire]

And if your bin lid isn't closed proerly, do you get a letter from your local council telling you that in future it won't be emptied, and if you leave the rubbish at the roadside the householder will face a fixed penalty notice of £50?
Just wondering, as my wheelie bin lid is never shut properly, i have two kids and am a full time childminder so have lots of rubbish./ I just thought i'd do a quick poll and see what other councils/local authoritys did.

I'll tell you later! My wheelie bin won't close properly and I've just put it out.

Round here they won't empty your bin if it's too heavy, not sure about the lid.

do u recycle?

No , they always take ours open or closed and any bags we leave too.
HOWEVER, we are going to ring and get some recycle boxes as they've just set that up in our area and our waste is terrible

Yes, sometimes, our bin men will empty it but recently they had a "work to rule" type protest which meant if your lid wasn't totally closed (even just sitting up one inch) they wouldn't collect it. Never tried leaving rubbish at the roadside so don't know about fines for that.

One time DH missed the bin collection so wheeled our bin over the road to have it collected with the neighbouring street when the lorry came back. We had a knock on the door from the 'bin police', man from the council, that being said he was decent about things and said the lorry would come back for our bin when it passed later.

and some!

They're real jobsworths about this around here. If the lid is even slightly open they just don't empty it! And side rubbish - apart from after Christmas when they miss a week - is never taken

ours is usually half empty, and the recycle boxes are overflowing. But they don't mind that. Where we were before there wasn't recycling and the bin would overflow but since it was flats, they never knew who put bags out on the kerbside. It's amazing how much can actually be recycled tho, our rubbish has more than halved.

We recycle,paper glass, tins, cans, cardboard so we only ever put two bags of rubbish out, so our wheelie bin not closing is not an issue.

We have brown bins, in which we are only allowed to put garden waste. We have blue bins for any kind of paper, which we put every bit of paper into, and all boxes get torn up and put in.
I also walk once a week round the corner to the bottle bank
The council (its Fife BTW) have put out booklets telling householders how to use the recycling centres. In this book it clearly states that any rubbish in the wheelie bin cannot be recycled, and needs to go in a landfill.
However on the letter thhey put through my letterbox today (because my lid wasn't closed - althoug it was when i left to go to school, so one of the neighbours must have dumped rubbish)
it says
"Residual waste will not be emptied by our crews if the lid is not closed proeprly, and any excess waste left at the side of the bin will not be uplifted."
It then goes on to say
"Envirnmental services feel that it is important to enforce this policy to further encourage recylcing at Recyclin points".
Yet they say in their leaflet that household waste cannot be recycled!!
One of my neighbours has been in a vicous circle since Christmas. They wouldn't empty her bin one day because it was full. The following week, she had taken two bags out, so they emptied it, but by then of course she had a backlog of rubbish, which is piling up at the back door!
Her husband is out of the country and she doesn't drive.

I asked this just to see what other council policys were. I'm maybe just being cross about it uneccesarily,however up until quite recently, bins in other areas of Fife would be emptied if they were full, but ours would be left.
I wish we had more recycling facilities.

saltire - re your neighbour's problem.
The bin men here will let you chuck an extra bag or two into the dustcart yourself. Perhaps she could try that.

Avalon. No they won't let us, she has tried it, and so has another neighbour

Can she arrange for a special coolection? Glasgow does those - and you arrange to put out your "xtra" rubbish on a particular day?

We have 3 bins:

A brown bin for garden waste

A green bin for rubbish that can be recycled

A black bin for everything else.

In theory it sounds good but the brown bin is pointless in this area. The gardens are the size of postage stamps so any waste is minimal at best. At this time of year there is nothing at all to go in them. We're also not allowed to include vegetable peelings as that is apparently classed as food. The range of things you are allowed to put in the green recycling bin is also limited. You can only put in paper, cans, and plastic bottles.

The bins are only emptied twice a month. The lid must be fully closed and no additional bags are taken away. Since the policy of emptying bins only twice a month was introduced the streets look and smell terrible. Bags of rubbish are left to pile up outside and are then ripped by cats, rats etc. Some bins are infested with maggots. The council's response to this was that bin-cleaning companies must have been going round dropping maggots in people's bins to get more business. Erm right......

I recycle, but they only empty my black bin every fortnight and I always have about 3 black sacks worth over, which I end up taking to the tip, along with plenty of others. The queues at the tip have got massivly bigger since they only started emptying the bin fortnightly. We always have loads to recycle, but with all the packaging on food etc, a lot of which you can't recycle because it's had the food directly on it, theres still a lot of waste.

I sometimes wonder what I pay my £130 a month council tax for, when I do recycle, yet end up at the tip myself every fortnight aswell.

It's been in the local paper loads, every summer theres an outbreak of maggots in everyones bin etc. quite disgusting.

rant over - sorry, but rubbish is a pain in the a**

We did until we got into recycling. We have a black box which is collected each week by the Council - they will take paper, glass, cardboard, foil etc. Then plastic bottles (and this was the majority of our rubbish tbh) go to the bottle bank at the supermarket. We compost any kitchen waste. It's amazing how much you can get it down!

Should say we got ours down from overflowing to being only 1/3 to 1/2 full. Have 2 kids.

I've just spoken to the man whose name was on the letter. He informed that
A) as from March 2007, Fife council will only be uplifting household rubbish once a fornight, in compliance with wait for it The Scottish Executives policy on reducing ladfill. He also assured me that it wouldn't mean peoples bins would be any fuller that they are on a weekly basis, and he also informed me that as a childminder, i am running a bussiness so should be paying bussiness rates for any extra uplifts!

Edinburgh Council wasted £30m last year on: a failed campaign to introduce a congestion charge; a campaign to put in trams, one line of which has been scapped due to cost - duh!; traffic 'calming' measures in town centre which they're now having to reverse due to massive losses in parking fines and trade income.

Yet they voted themselves a huge pay rise and increased tax 5% for the coming fiscal year.

And the rubbish uplift is now once a fortnight in some areas.

Can't see myself voting Labour in the next election, for some reason.

I don't know where you are all getting your rubbish from. Our bin is never more than half full, we could easily go to fortnightly collections. The green bin is full after the first week near enough.

Hope they don't bring in fortnightly bin collections here, then. I always have a full bin (3 kids), I recycle cans and bottles and paper.
I also use a compost bin so the vegetable peelings don't go in.

Can you get a bigger bin, saltire?

yup! And my recycling bins overflow every week.

It's not every week that i have a full bin, however if I've been having a big clear up, then i can sometimes have extra rubbish, or if i have visitors. My Blue bin for paper is full to the top evry month, and in the summer my brown bin for garden rubbish is overflowing as well.

So what you are saying Saltire is that the fact that yuo are sometimes overflowing is not to do with the fact that you are a childminder? ie more to do with if you're having a clear out or guests.

What did the man from the council have to say about the fact that others can put stuff in your bin after you have left the house?

The Glasgow bin men do take the bins even if the lid is not shut.

We have nine bins/boxes at our house! We live in a conversion, it the house has been split in two. Our neighbours "nicked" a green bin (ie the ordianry one) from a flat they used to rent nearby, so that maeks

3 green bins
2 brown bins
2 blue bins
2 bottle boxes

The brown bins are emptied once a fortnight in summer and once every four weeks in winter. They are often overflwoing int he summer - but then, we do have very large gardens.

The blue bins (paper, plastic bottles and all types of cans) are picked up every four weeks.

The green bins are picked up once a week and we often have all three bins out - but like you, it seems to depend on whether our neghbours or us are having a clear out.

The bottle pickup seems to be erratic - so that we now have a load of bottles in our garage which I will need to take to the bottlebank myslef.

I also put all my vegetable waste on to the compost week - but suspect I could still easily fill a green bin oursleves on a rgualr basis, even with all the other recycling.

I don't see the logic of your moan from coucil's argument: from next year, they will only pick up once a fortnight, but it shouldn't mean that your bin will any fuller? Eh???????

Yes - ours is overflowing and it's not collected till Thursday