Fortnightly Bin Collections 26 Apr 07
Who knew that something as simple as how often rubbish bins are collected could be blown up into such a large issue that the Daily Mail would start a campaign to save weekly rubbish collections and it’s being speculated that the issue could affect local council elections in England and Wales. The whole debate revolves around whether normal rubbish bins should be collected every week or if fortnightly collections would be sufficient.
The argument put forward by the councils, for fortnightly collections, is that they want to, or already do, offer collection of recyclable waste on the in-between weeks to try to encourage more people to recycle more rubbish. They also state that the more rubbish people recycle, the less waste they’ll be putting into the normal bin and therefore those bins will need to be emptied less often.
So what’s the problem? Well, many people are complaining that collecting normal bins only on alternate weeks leads to increased problems with bad smells, flies, maggots and even rats. Others believe that whole issue is just about greedy councils trying to provide a reduced service without lowering council tax bills and some claim that recycling rates are not increased by reducing the collections of non-recyclable waste.
Each side backs up its arguments with its own set of statistics and expert opinions, but neither seems to pay much attention to the experiences of the individuals, like ourselves, who already have fortnightly collections.
Our council collects normal bins and recycling bins on alternate weeks and has done so for some time now. The two recycling bins are both wheelie bins, not the small boxes used in some areas – a brown one for compostable garden waste and a slightly smaller blue one for paper, card, tin cans, aerosols, margarine tubs, plastic bottles etc. For households with larger amounts of recyclable waste, a full-size blue wheelie bin is available on request.
Only having the normal or ‘landfill’ bin emptied fortnightly has encouraged us to think more about what we put into it and as a result this bin is hardly ever full, even after two weeks. If we weren’t able to put as many different kinds of waste in the recycling bins, then it might be a different story, but fortunately that’s not the case.
We’ve never had any problems with bad smells (not any more than with weekly bin collections anyway), maggots (though I don’t go looking for them), flies or rats. In fact our only real issue with scheme is the extra room needed for the additional bins. Any other gripes we have are about the items which can’t be put in the recycling bins, including glass, kitchen waste and shredded paper, although other facilities are available for recycling these.
However, the inconsistency of recycling schemes, not just between different councils but also within individual councils, leads to some very confusing conversations on the topic amongst our friends and family. Some parts of Belfast still use the small recycling boxes, which glass can be put into but don’t hold nearly as much waste, and friends of ours, who live only a mile or so away, fall into a different council borough, with completely different recycling policies. Things would be a lot simpler if the councils could agree on a single strategy that they’d all use. We’re not holding our breath though.
Posted by Nev in Going Green , Recycling with tags eco-friendly, green, recycle, reduce, waste
