We up here in Edinburgh have been blessed with one of the worst councils known to man, I just need to cite the Trams at three times over budget and only covering half the original planned route and being as slow as walking. And the parliament which was 10 times over budget and rising. But where they are really useless is rubbish and recycling collection. I get an email each Sunday AM telling me which particular bin and box is scheduled to be emptied that week. This week was no exception as the council said that the Normal Monday collection rules apply. So this week it was Green recycling wheelie bin and blue box for glass. The blue box is a very hit and miss as to whether it will be emptied and generally only gets emptied once a month. Not usually an issue with the green bins except this week the driver went past three blocks of 6 flats where a total of 12 bins need to be emptied this was not on the Monday but for some reason a Tuesday at 07:15, I was out walking the cat so noted the time. I reported it and after many apologies I was informed that they would be collected sometime in the following 24 hours which did not happen but another lorry did pass at 12:30 yesterday without stopping. I have just phoned again and again many apologies but no real indication of how they were going to resolve the situation. Though on telling the representative that I wanted to escalate the issue to a formal complaint and speak to his manager he took my number and told me someone would be in touch. This is sod all to do with money and everything to do with time and laziness. My 100m stretch of the road usually means a small diversion off their route, some if they are early enough will reverse down thereby getting back on their route easier than if they came down my road normally but already 24 hours behind schedule it would seem easier to ignore the bins and hope that us plebs put it down to the time of year. I have a sneaking suspicion that the bins will still be full when the council shout down for the new year break.
my bins weren't collected on Monday either - but then again my local council told everyone , they wouldn`t be as it is boxing day! the next set day will be next week and as this week was missed then extra in black sacks will be accepted
Without reading the body of your post, I can easily answer the question posed in the thread title: because we have to. I don't know if you've noticed, but the Earth is - modulo the occasional visit by a meteorite and the energy we get from the sun - a closed system. We have as many resources as we have, and no more. If we use up all those resources, nobody's going to swing by and give us any more. Likewise, the waste we generate has to go somewhere - and that somewhere is, invariably, landfill. Take a look at a map. See how small the UK is? Go forward in time far enough and we no longer have any land to live on or grow crops on; it's all landfill. How do we solve these problems, assuming pulling an Interstellar and finding a Goldilocks planet through a fourth-dimensional wormhole isn't an option? We reduce our waste and maximise the reuse of our resources. Remember the mantra: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Reduce the amount of waste you generate. When you're shopping, bring your own bags. When choosing a corn on the cob to buy, pick the ones loose still in their husk rather than the ones that have been processed before being double-wrapped in non-recyclable plastic. Buy a big bag of something rather than four small bags, and do the same for bottles of stuff. Reuse what you do have. Instead of throwing away hand-soap dispensers when they're empty, buy a bulk bottle and refill 'em. Added bonus: you save money! Takeaway containers become seed germination boxes, junk mail becomes notepaper, The Sun remains something to wipe your arse on. Got a bunch of spare screws? Stick 'em in a cleaned-out jam-jar. And, again, take your bags with you when you go shopping! Finally, when you've reduced and reused as much as you can, Recycle. This should always be the last step of the process. Some things can be recycled more than others: glass and aluminium are near-infinitely recyclable, while paper suffers from quality issues the more it runs through the process - which is why a lot of post-consumer paper waste ends up as bog roll, and even then it's usually mixed with pristine fibres. Now, while you can take control of the Reduce and Reuse stages, Recycling is more difficult. It's an at-scale operation, so you're relying on your - apparently pretty useless - council to pick the stuff up and send it on to the recycling facility. If they're not doing that, then short of driving your recycling to the nearest collection facility - there's one at the Morrison's up the road from me, for plastics, glass, and metals, plus a battery bin in the shop itself - there's not much you can do when your bins are full. That's not a problem with recycling, though, that's a problem with your council - and even if you end up having to put recyclables in the general waste 'cos your bins are full and the council ain't collecting them, when they eventually do collect 'em that's still a bunch of stuff that previously would have gone into landfill that now hasn't. TL;DR: 'Cos we have to.
But we were told it would be a normal service so I suppose in that respect they were correct as it is a very poor service generally up here any time of the year.
My post is about my council and really nothing to do with why we recycle of which I am a staunch believer in. As for delivering it to various supermarkets I would need a car and to be honest it was felt that more people would make the effort to recycle if all they had to do is go as far as their back door for the requisite bin. But if the council then fails to collect said recycling then it is a pointless exercise.
No, it isn't; see the final paragraph of my post. The council will, eventually, collect the bin, and when it does that's a bin-full of rubbish that would have gone into landfill being recycled. Quite the opposite of pointless.
And whilst the council is deciding when or even if to collect the 12 full bins where prey do we store the recycling that would be going into empty bins by now as my council does not accept any other receptacle that the bins provided for each material, so no carrier bags, no black bags, cardboard boxes ETC?
As my final paragraph says, you throw it into general waste. S'not your fault if there's no room in the recycling bin. But, and to my point here, if your council didn't offer recycling facilities at all then you would always be throwing recyclables into general waste. Even if the council only empties the recycling bin once a year, that's still one bin-load (times however many households) that isn't going into landfill. So, as I said, not pointless. (Also, it's "where, pray," not "where, prey," unless you're a hunter asking your lunch where something is.)
So we throw it into the general waste bin, hmm our council decided that we would only need a very small general waste bin as we will be doing so much recycling so not an option there. (And thanks for the definition lesson on the words pray and prey, noted)
Then you tell your council that all your bins are full and you will, as a result, be putting rubbish out in black bags/cardboard boxes/whatever container you have to hand. I know our council is fine about picking those up if the lack of space in the bins is a result of them missing a collection or similar. By contrast, my council provides three full-size wheelie bins. The first is green and is for general waste; the second is grey and is for recyclables, split into cardboard and paper into the main section and glass, metal, and some plastics in a blue caddy at the top; the third is for garden waste, though cutbacks mean they no longer collect that one unless you pay an annual fee. Collections are pretty regular, with only the occasional miss - at one point for a couple of weeks, so a lot of bin bags were balanced near the bins! I also have a compost bin, the purchase of which was subsidised by the council, for garden and kitchen waste.
Our council is funny. You can put out a black bag with literally anything in it and they will take it, because it is in a black bag. Same goes for cardboard boxes. I put out a Bose amp out of the back of a subwoofer and they left it, yet the following week I put it in a cardboard box, taped it up and sure as eggs it was gone the next day Went out this morning to check the bins (god it was cold, ice cold fog !) and the woman next door had a surprise waiting for her. She has clearly not learned the cardboard box trick and so still had an enormous pile of crap left for her.
I think councils are universally mediocre/crap. We were lucky, our bin day fell between the two breaks and was unaffected. Although the recycling bin is a little more full than usual..
According to the second council representative I spoke to today. When I was told by her colleague that the bins would be emptied within 48 hours following my first report on Wednesday 08:00 am foolishly I beleived the 48 hours would start from the phone call but they actually start from the next day. But she said that they could be emptied up to 22.00 pm tonight. I am not holding my breath. As for using boxes or black bags etc this us an absolute no no. Infact if you have put out your garden waste bin had son's passing pedestrian drops crisp packet in ut father than rye pavement. That bin will not be emptied and instead a label will be attached pointing out that there is something in the bin which is not allowed. We have a poor council, a bunch of workshy council workers made worse by incredibly ineffectual management who are scared of the workforce they are supposed to manage.
This house has been recycling for the past hummm 20 years or so. We try to recycle as much as we can and next summer we will begin composting (as much as possible), maybe it won't save the planet but at least we are trying.
I recycle, but there's one thing I've been bothered by - large fast food chains. They distribute large amounts of recyclable packaging, which is then thrown into normal refuse with everything else.
Your council sounds similar to mine. We used to have the three wheelie bin solution and it was great. Now they have replaced them with these stupid grey boxes that are about the third of the size and blow away in the wind. The amount of money they must have spent on the new boxes and trucks to collect them must be ridiculous.
Needless to say that the bins remain un-emptied this morning and I can pretty much guarantee that they will now not be emptied until a week on Monday which is the next scheduled uplift.
I live about 20 miles along the road from you, different council (West Lothian), and there was a 2 day delay at Christmas - not to be unexpected, the binmen are allowed holidays too All this was on their website, not sure if yours would be the same?
As I mentioned in my original post I received the usual email stating that collections would be as normal. So absolutely nothing to do with "binmen are allowed holidays" as the binmen in Edinburgh are blessed with some of shortest hours in the UK. There was a bit of a furore when it was discovered that they were, on average, working less than 4 hours a day under what we used to call 'job and knock' where you could finish for they day once the work was completed. Except they were not collecting all the waste on their routes and using various excuses like " The bin was not out when they came to collect" Late presentation I think our council call it. And I don't think driving by 12 full bins can be excused for any reason. As I have already said we have incredibly poor management within council department and the workforce take advantage of it.
