You have to buy your own wheelie bin. They are not provided.
Recycling facilities are twenty years out of date; you have to separate everything into no less than four different containers. Cardboard has to go into such a small bag you have to tear up any boxes into a zillion pieces to get them in. If you put them out not in the requisite bag, they are left behind.
There is a faffy list a yard long of what can and cannot be recycled. Loads of types of packaging we could recycle where I used to live cannot be recycled here. If you accidentally put a wrong item in a wrong container, the whole container will be left unemptied with a sticker on it telling you off.
Even the woman on the phone at the council called the recycling staff "Jobsworths".
Now, I've had a bad day. Small sick whinging children. So I feel like a whinge myself after spending the past half hour tearing up cardboard and fishing out the wrong sort of plastic from my rejected plastic box, in a futility room whose floor space seems to be entirely taken up by recycling paraphernalia. But really, was I just spoilt in London where you just chuck all the recycling in one wheelie bin, and all the landfill in another? Or are other councils this Neanderthal?
They don't even collect garden waste. At all.
I love it out in the countryside, I really do, but this is the one thing, the one and only thing I miss about London.
