Seven Bins?

[Bill]

I’ve just been watching some telly where they were saying that some councils were considering increasing the number of waste bins by having five item specific recycling bins which would make it six or seven for most households.

I’m all in favour of recycling but this isn’t going to be practical for a lot of people especially those in terraced housing with limited outside space. It was suggested that such areas could have communion bins on each road, but aside from the visual blight, it could create huge problems.

My question is, do we really want to go down this line in order to make life easier for the councils recycling or would we be happier to accept a slightly higher council tax to pay for them to sort it for us?

  

Bill 😊

[Observer II]

I tried to take this seriously, by putting "plastic" bags into the blue bin, only to get it rejected by the binmen.   So now everything goes into the black bin.    

[Evil Sid]

tut tut can't go putting plastic bags in the recycling bins.

the thinking behind that is that people could throw non-recyclable waste in there and so contaminate the whole bin-wagon load.

given the number of bins that get left out 24/7 it would be a nightmare you would not get the bin-wagon down the street for them.

having communal bins would just as bad especially given the number of normal bins that currently  get set light to.

[Bill]

Think the idea would be that they would collect one bin at a time Sid, one week they’d be collecting paper, the following week it’d be glass and so on. So you’re not putting any more bins out, it’s just that your back garden would look like a recycling station. Edit see what you mean if they're all at the front!

In a way, it's rather similar to what you said about the doctor’s phone in that we all have to suffer mega waits in order to save them employing someone to answer the phone. Here it’s us again being inconvenienced to save the council money. Given the choice, I’d prefer to pay a bit more to avoid this but anything that puts the rates up is usually seen as a failure by the political fraternity.

I get the idea that sorting the waste this way would mean there’s less cross contamination but it’s not without some big downsides. And if it’s all about contamination, how long will it be before bins start getting refused because you’ve left the paper label on the plastic bottle or not rinsed out the baked bean tin properly?  I make sure my recycle stuff is clean, but I know others don’t make any effort at all.

 

Bill 😊

[Evil Sid]

16 hours ago, Bill said:

Think the idea would be that they would collect one bin at a time Sid, one week they’d be collecting paper, the following week it’d be glass and so on

which would mean that you get the bins emptied every seven weeks, unless they do one lot per day and that would really put the cost up.

the amount of recyclable stuff that me and mrs sid generate means that i could get away with a once a month collection for my blue bin. i have a large swing bin in my kitchen just for recyclable stuff and that has a plastic bin liner in it. when it gets full i empty that into the blue bin and reuse the bin liner until it gets too many holes.