General Chat

Your grass clippings can just be left on the lawn, Florence, where they'll act as a mulch and return nutrients to the soil. (Unless whoever cuts your grass refuses to do that - is it a council employee?).

If you had a compost bin in a corner of the garden, all your fruit & veg peelings could go into that, along with some shredded paper, and would gradually compost without any smell. Some grass could go into that if necessary, although not large amounts.
I'm sure a neighbour would use the resulting compost for their garden - or you could list it on Freecycle when the bin is full - which would take a couple of years, if mine is anything to go by.
I keep a small bowl, lined with a sheet of paper towel, on the worktop, and when it's full of peelings I just tip the whole lot into the compost bin.

Then the only thing you'd have in your food waste bin would be meat scraps.

I don't eat a lot of meat, and when I do it's boneless stuff like chicken fillets, mince, sausages, etc, so I don't have meat scraps except for occasional bits of bacon fat, which I put out on the grass. Something eats it! Local cats, perhaps, or maybe birds.

We don't have a food waste collection, so we have to deal with it ourselves.

I don't have a problem with my food caddy (which we have had for many years) the small bin sits in the kitchen and is emptied into the larger caddy once a week when it is collected. It is rarely more than a third full. But i do have another bin for raw veg, peelings etc which goes into my compost bin in the garden.

Oh yes names, ty hadn't thought about creepy crawlies yeeeuk. So I shall indeed take a photo and send if needs be.

We don’t generally have a problem with the small kitchen caddy, and unless it is hot it doesn’t get moved to the outdoor caddy until it is full. ( both supplied by the council).

Word of advice - don’t put the grass cuttings on top of the food waste. It acts as an incubator, and don’t be afraid to photograph the maggots and send it to the council ( or them ;-) )

When I say a food bag a day names, I mean I shall empty if only a few scraps to the bin outside. I really don't want say chicken scraps sitting in my kitchen for a few days! We try not to waste food but when peeling and chopping veg, you have the skins, fruit peel, sometimes the bananas go off if we just haven't eaten them.

If I make curry and there is a bit left, I do freeze that for another day.

I get my grass cut every 2 weeks and that used to coincide with the bin collection which was great. They cut the grass and then an hour later the bin lorry came, so worked out well. But now with a 3 week collection that will mess that system up.

I did buy paper liners for the organic bin to try and keep it cleaner with the grass, but the moisture from the grass rotted the paper liner!!

I only have a huge lawn at the back and front, no dug up areas, hence all my plants in pots. The lawn was laid turf 2 years ago and beneath it is hardcore and rubble so even if I wanted to, the ground doesn't have good soil underneath to dig and plant say roses where I could mulch the grass. I am not fit and able to dig anything so that's out of the question.

The new collections apply to the whole of Lewis & Harris not just the villages way out.

Yes, I think our clean fresh air is about to be somewhat polluted. So much for being environmentally friendly.

Florence in the hebrides

A food bag a day, you need to channel Sharon and her amazing recipies ;-) :-D

When I tried to order 2 packs of food bin bags from the waste people ( in the early days) they refused as they said the bags would not last and would deteriorate.

I hate to think how badly the Hebrides will stink, or will they be collecting in Stornaway as usual and it just you people out in the sticks that will suffer. (My council only seem to be aware of those that live in a couple of towns and everyone else can go ……)

Somewhere is talking about bins only being collected on 4 days in a week. Glad I don’t have to sort that rota.
Added. Just thinking back to when we given our first kitchen caddy. It went in the gree garden bin for fortnightly collection. Advice was to store it in the freezer or put it in the general bin for the alternate week. Now we have a kitchen caddy and a large outdoor caddy for a weekly collection. I think there would be riots if we had to wait 3 weeks for the food waste collection.

Well we got notified today of the new collection dates so:

Blue bins-mixed recycling(plastic, paper, tins etc) &
Organic-Food, grass, carboard will both be 3 weekly on the same day.

Non organic- 3 weekly on different day

Green- Glass bin 3 monthly

So all the food waste will sit with the rotting grass for 3 weeks in the same bin! We are now into warmer weather so all that food rotting for 3 weeks is going to smell dreadful as well as rotting grass.

My blue bin is full of paper, tins and plastic after just 10 days so not sure what we will do when after 2 weeks its full up?? Where are we supposed to put the rest?

I cant store it in my house. I do break up all boxes etc into the smallest pieces to fit it all in the bin but plastic bottles do not squash well.

We will be getting a food caddie and 20 compostable bags but I have now had to order 100 more to last us as i'm sure we will be using 1 a day as I shall be emptying the food outside daily.

Not a happy bunny. :-P

Florence in the hebrides

The bin men here aren't supposed to take anything that's not actually in the bin - but they usually do.
One of my neighbours regularly has black plastic bags of stuff out beside her bin.
Thank goodness the men don't just let it all pile up week after week.

Oh my Andysmum! But here the bin men do look in your bin and if you have put things in the wrong bin, they wont empty it and you can get fined £1000 say putting glass in amongst plastic or plastic in the organic. They also only empty what's in the bin, so putting extra cardboard beside the bin because you cant fit it in, will stay uncollected. :-|

AG, I haven't heard of that ! I shall also be totally confused as to what goes in what colour. At the moment we have blue and green bins for the same contents as yours, plus a smaller grey one for bottles and jars and a caddy for food waste.

Food is weekly, blue is fortnightly. green is three-weekly and grey is four-weekly. Blue and green were originally alternate weeks, but they changed the green one because they were short of drivers and could collect more this way.

One thing that is very unfair - the local tip is on the outskirts of the nearby town and you need a car to get there unless you are very fit and fancy an uphill walk carrying your rubbish. We are allowed to put unlimited garden waste in our bin because we are in a village, but the residents of the town are not supposed to put any in their bins. If the bin lorry men find a bin with garden waste in it, they empty it on to the pavement!! :-|

In our rural part of Highland Region, we have a blue bin for paper/card, some plastics, tins, etc, and a green one for anything that we're not allowed to put into the blue one.
My green one is usually full of garden prunings/twiggy stuff, which I allow to dry under the carport before putting it into the bin, so that there's nothing rotting..

Glass is not recycled via kerbside collections.
We have no food waste collection.
Grass goes on my flowerbeds or under shrubs as mulch, and non-twiggy garden waste goes into my compost bin.
Plastic bags, film, etc can be put into bins at supermarkets.

The two bins are emptied in alternate weeks. Often I don't need to put the blue one out for 6 weeks, as I live alone, don't get a daily newspaper, and don't buy big plastic bottles of water or fizzy drinks.

However, as from April next year "if an application to the Scottish Government’s Improvement Fund is successful", I'll be totally confused,as the bins will change.

"The existing green general waste bin will be converted to collect mixed containers (plastic bottles, pots, tubs, trays, cans, tins, foil, cartons, and potentially soft plastics). The existing blue bin currently used for mixed recycling will be converted to collect paper and card.
The Council’s application to the Recycling Improvement Fund includes the provision of replacement smaller general waste bins for all households."

So I'll have less bin-space for the twiggy garden waste , and will have to get used to putting most recycling stuff into the green bin instead of the blue one.
The blue one will hardly ever need to be emptied if it's only for paper and card.

Don't know what colour the new smaller "general waste" bin will be - hopefully not orange!

https://www.highland.gov.uk/news/article/15149/new_recycling_service_roll-out_approved_pending_successful_rif_application

grannyfanny, WA recently had a similar recycling system which was heavily promoted by the major supermarkets. It was for all the 'light' plastics such as shopping bags and clingfilm type of products.

Then it was discovered that the Company offering the service was not recycling the material but was storing vast amounts in warehouses up and down the State so the system collapsed and all that material has to go in the general waste.

Edit. Just done a bit more research into the scheme here is a link to the ABC story

https://tinyurl.com/mtt4e4hw

We recycle as much as possible and are happy in general with the bin collections. However we heard that supermarkets often have recycling for thin plastic, like bags, film, cat and baby food pouches....

We collect all those into big bags and take them to the supermarket when we go every 3 weeks or so.
I understand this is not an option for many, but it certainly reduces the general waste.

Here in WA most councils run a three bin system; one bin (yellow lid) is for recycling materials such as glass paper cans etc, another bin(red lid) is for general waste and the third (lime green lid) is known as the Fo-Go bin which in reality is an acronym for food organics, garden organics.

The Fo-Go bin is emptied weekly and the other bins are emptied on alternate fortnights so that on bin collection day two bins are put out.

Bins are usually 240 litre, but our own particular Shire will provide smaller bins for general waste as well as a smaller fo-go bin for those who do not have much organic waste.

On a personal note, we have both a compost bin and a worm farm

Local advice used to veto freeze the food left overs like Sylvia. But what if you got a small freezer or a full freezer?

ZZzzz you mean you dont like recycling anything?

I am fed up with it all to be honest and one councillor made the mistake of asking me what I thought of the idea, I told him and he is in no doubt that I don't like the idea.

Our food left-overs go into the Compost Bin which is collected weekly from March to around December, then bi-weekly in the winter months.

The advice we've been given for many years re food waste is to wrap the food and put it into plastic bags, and put it into the freezer until time to put it out in the bin.

Don't forget that it is not only smells ................. rats are attracted by smells, and here we have things like raccoons, and if you live in the right (?wrong) area even bears becoming habituated to garbage cans in cities.

We have 5 receptacles (6 if you have a garden waste bin) - bag and boxes for glass, tins, cardboard, paper etc., a food caddy and a wheelie bin for general waste. The wheelies are collected every 3 weeks, all the others collected weekly It works really well as far as I'm concerned, we have so little food waste, 90% of it is peelings and coffee grounds. We haven't yet sorted a compost heap so peelings will go on that eventually. Our wheelie bin is the smaller one (140L?) and I usually only have 2 bin liners worth every 3 weeks.

Back to plastic crates and rolls of plastic bags then.....

The real problem, the creation of waste, needs addressing. We can't go on being such a wasteful society!