General Chat

Well just when the day cant get any worse, the local council have just announced changes to bin collections.

At present I have 4 bins(full size) ! green bin for glass, 1 blue bin for paper & plastic recycling, 1 black bin for organic including garden waste and 1 black bin for non-recyclable.
So blue & green bins at present are every 2 weeks and alternating 2 weekly are the black bins. Today it has been announced, the green bins will be emptied every 8 weeks and the rest every 3 weeks.

My blue bin and organic bin are always full after about 10 days as they are full of paper, plastic, cardboard and grass cuttings etc. They are overflowing by the time they are emptied at 2 weeks. So what are we supposed to do for another week and the smell of rotting food in the summer will be awful?

The green bin for glass tbh is never full as we dont drink rarely and only has a few jars of sauces or beetroot etc so 8 weeks is ok. But for the rest, its rediculous.

How often are you bins emptied and how many do you have?

Florence in the hebrides

As moment, our bins emptied weekly, the whole road is weekly, that covers small blocks flats as well. We are quite lucky

When you say full size, do you mean wheelie bins?

We have a general waste bin, a garden waste bin, a box for paper/cardboard, the same for glass and a bag for plastic & tins. They are all collected 2 weekly. The general waste is the only one collected on that week. You can see some locals struggle with the size of the bottle box ;-)

We have three bins and a box.
One bin is for general waste for landfill. The box is for glass. One bin is for all other recycling including, plastic, paper and cardboard. The third green bin is for garden waste, but you only get that if you pay an annual fee for it. They are all collected every two weeks, although the garden waste one isn’t collected in winter. We don’t have a compost bin for kitchen waste, that has to go into the landfill

We are very lucky, we have 4 bins, 1, garden waste and food waste is collected every week. The other 3 bins are paper/card and glass/ tins/plastic bottles, the third is general waste. One of those is collected per week on rotation.

We heard that Tesco (and other supermarkets, I believe), will take soft plastic waste so we collect that together in a bucket and take it when we go to Tesco, every few weeks. It's amazing how much of our waste is soft plastic, all sorts of bits, and as it doesn't squash down easily, it takes up a lot of space in the bin.

I guess i am lucky in away with 4 wheelie bins then but even so the recycling and organic fill very quickly. If i order something online and it comes in a box, then i take it apart and tear it down into smaller pieces, the same with tissue boxes, cereal boxes etc so i can get maximum in the bin. 3 weeks is an awful long time!

im guessing our council is cutting jobs and hours and so less collections equals less staff and less paid out in wages..Plastic bottles dont squash so easily and so they take up a lot of room in the bin. In the summer, my grass is cut fortnightly so can you imagine the bin full of grass all sweating, plus food waste.it will smell terrible.

Just as well you dont drink much Names lol

Florence in the hebrides

I have 3 wheelie bins. Green for non recyclable, brown garden waste, blue recyclable and a small bin kitchen waste. Kitchen waste is weekly, green and brown one week, blue next week (so two weekly). It works well.

I tend to recycle bottles, jars and plastic containers that need only a cold water rinse as I am not on a water meter so the cost to me would not increase with the usage.

Any jars or plastic containers that need hot or hot, soapy water are ditched as I am not going to pay extra for washing-up liquid nor am I going to increase my power usage as I feel that rather defeats the object of saving the planet. It doesn’t do my power bill any good either.

I have searched in vain to see whether any studies have been done on this. If anyone has seen studies on this comparison could you point me in their direction please.

We have 3 wheelie bins, green for mixed recycling, brown for garden waste, black for general waste.
They are emptied 2 weekly, brown and green one week, black the next.

Vegetable peelings etc can go in garden bin, we have no collection for cooked kitchen waste so that goes in with general waste. I did hear that councils cannot charge for this so that will be why we don't have a collection!

We have to pay for our garden bin, about £50 annually. I have noticed many other areas are starting to charge for garden waste now.

I just wash my recycling cans, jars etc when I am washing the dishes, so no extra hot water needed.

We don’t have bins as such. We have plastic bags. Black for general waste, clear for

recycling. We have garden bags for green waste and a food bin for food waste.

Most people but their black bags in a bin because of foxes. Everything is collected weekly.
However as I have a garden I put all vegetable waste in a wormery or compost bin. Grass cuttings go in the compost together with any suitable cardboard leaves etc.

Any food scraps that can’t be composted go in the food caddy collected by the council.
I think we are very lucky in this area to have a good collection service in this area.

Joy we just wash out our jars when washing up or they go in the dishwasher. :-)

I have two wheelie bins - a blue one for paper/cardboard/tins/plastic (basically anything recyclable, except glass or plastic bags) , and a green one for anything else except glass..

They're emptied 2-weekly - blue one week and green the next.

The green one mainly has garden waste in it (which I let dry under the carport as much as possible so as not to have wet stuff in the bin), and occasionally also some non-recyclable plastic or other stuff. It needs to be emptied every time.

Grass cuttings go on the flowerbeds as mulch, and not in the bin.

The blue one only needs to be emptied every six weeks or so, as I don't get a daily newspaper, and don't buy drinks in plastic bottles, except milk.

I save up plastic bags, and then take them to the plastic bag recycling bin in the supermarket when I've collected a bundle.
Glass is the same - I save up the occasional jar until I have a few, then take them to the recycling bin at the supermarket. There's no glass collection from the house.

I don't have kitchen waste to any extent. I eat what I cook, and don't have leftovers. Veg peelings, etc, go into the compost bin for the garden.
The scrapings of my porridge pan go out onto the grass, and the birds eat it - especially a robin which hangs around the back door area and keeps an eye on me through the window until I've put it out for him!

A council near me swopped all the big general waste bins to a smaller size to encourage recycling. What did they do with all those perfectly usable large bins?

Names, if they reduce the size of the bin, then where will say my recycling go to? I cannot cut down on packaging that comes with my shopping delivery nor anything i order online thats either delivered in a paper package or a plastic bag.

I sort everything into the different bins as here the refuse collectors actually look in the bin before they take it. If you say stuck an old toaster in the glass bin, they will knock on your door and give it back and you get a warning, after that, they will fine you for putting say glass in the wrong bin if they see it.

Considering we pay council tax, we do half their job for them but once it arrives at the recycling plant 20 odd miles away, the rubbish is resorted. Food waste is converted into electricity to run the centre which is very efficient. Im sure the cans and bottles are all washed there before being squashed down into"plastic squares". These are then sent to the mainland and remade into other plastic products.

We have an excessive mountain of glass that nobody wants. Its unsaleable as they say there is just so much waste glass on the mainland and they cant get rid of it. Some has been ground into smaller pieces to use in gardens on pathways but thats only a small scale business.

My dad complained about using his hot water and washing liquid to clean jars and refuses to do this as his says thats the job of the recycling plant and hes on a water meter too!

We do all we can and cannot do any more. A household will always have waste be it plastic, paper or food etc.Strangely here, polystyrene cannot go in the recycling bins, it has to go in the non-recyclable bin. You can imagine when i got my new tumble dryer recently, the amount of packaging I had and it filled several different bins!

Florence in the hebrides

I would not have been amused if it had been my council reducing the size of the wheelie bin.

I expect if you complain they will tell you that you can take it to the tip. Be cause everyone has a car :-P

Any pots etc that need a wash get put in the dirty washing up water when everything else has been done.

I remember once when I worked in a nursery we took a group of 3-5 yr olds to a local recycling collection point. It was only a 5 minute walk from the nursery. So armed with bags of plastic bottles etc, we lifted the kids to put something in these huge bins except they were totally full to overflowing!!

When peoples own bins were full, they were going to their nearest community recycling bins to get rid of excess plastic etc but the council could not keep up with demand and so many times you would go and come back with your recycling as too full to take any more!
I think they should have a machine that squashes plastic bottles and compacts them so you can get more bottles in the receptacle. It could be run off solar energy or something like that? Maybe there is a small machine available already to do this?

Might go online and take a peek. Will let you know what i find.

Florence in the hebrides

You can get a can crusher, but of course that means more cardboard and packing. I’m not sure about plastic bottles, but I do know you have to put the tops back on or find somewhere else for them to go. They mustn’t go loose as they get stuck in machinery.

Requirements seem to vary from one local authority to another.

Here in the Highland Region, we're instructed to remove bottle tops, and put them in the bin separately.

I stand on tins/cans to flatten them a bit.
As I never have big plastic bottles, I don't know if that works with them or not - would they just pop back into shape?

Yes, if you squash say a litre bottle of flavoured water, it just springs back. i do drink a lot of the volvic still flavoured waters as they are sugar free and are good to take my tabs with. The tap water isnt the nicest of tastes so I do have a lot of plastic bottles.

I do remove the bottle tops though. The school used to be part of a scheme that collected milk bottle caps. They were sent off somewhere and in return, the school received money for them for school funds. Over the years we collected thousands!

I did see a can crusher but not that cheap! However couldnt see anything similar to crush bottles.

One of my bin men do put back my bins for me without asking as he knows I have a stick so at xmas this year, I shall give them a tin of something to thank them.

I do actually remember over 20 years ago when we switched from weekly to fortnightly there was an uproar amongst people. We shall see what happens once this 3 weekly system has been in place a while!

Florence in the hebrides

We have 3 wheelie bins including a garden bin we pay for. The other 2 are for general rubbish and recycling. The general rubbish is collected weekly and the garden and recycling bins each go out fortnightly.

Our kitchen waste goes in the bin in the kitchen in a bin liner, so we don't get mess or smells in the wheelie bin. Anything runny or messy gets flushed down the toilet Florence. That is pretty much all that goes in our general rubbish bin so it's rarely more than a quarter full. The recycling bin is crammed to the gills every fortnight though as we have several newspapers. We crush everything down we can and plastic, glass, paper and cardboard all go in there. If we want we can cut cardboard boxes to make them flat and they will take them if we put them at the side of the bin if there's no room for them inside the bin, but we must cut pieces down so that they would go in the bin if there was room! We take our shredded paper to a local smallholding.