Switch to alternate weekly rubbish collections to save councils money?

Mids_Costcutter

Is it time for all councils to switch to alternate weekly collections of household waste (one week recyclables / compostables, following week general waste)?

The Local Government Association point out that councils with the system in place have a recycling rate more than 30 per cent higher than those who do not. In turn this reduces the amount of waste dumped in landfill sites, where it is taxed by the tonne. This could save £millions in landfill taxes alone, not to mention the huge number of lorry journeys and associated costs eliminated.

http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/core/page.do?pageId=41797

Apart from education and social care, waste collection and disposal is the biggest area of council spending. Yet, unlike social care or even health services, everybody uses local authority waste services.

At present, less than half of local authorities empty bins on a fortnightly basis. I appreciate that this system probably can't work in areas that still use black bags only for general waste and don't have proper bins, but otherwise can't the myths and prejudices e.g. increased vermin be overcome?

What do you think?

A._Badger

I think it would be a good idea if elected councillors gave people what they elected them to provide - efficient public services. Not acting as Green gauleiters, forcing on people schemes and ideas they were not elected to champion and for which there is little manifest support outside of the political fringe.

bertiebots

We are a family of 5 and luckily have a council with a good attitude to recycling. We have fortnightly collections of gray bins and because we are allowed to have as many green bins + a glass box as needed we have ample recycling room. Bins are collected on alternate weeks. Glass is collected once a month.
I know that this simply isn't practical everywhere, but it would be a lot easier for people to adjust if there weren't so many scare stories in the media about how terrible it is to manage with fortnightly collections.
Its not terrible , we don't have rats , we don't have rubbish all over our streets, we half fill our gray bin in a fortnight with 3 kids and 2 adults in the house, but do fill 2 green bins. It takes about 3 seconds to put recycle waste in a seperate bag to put in said green bins, rather than the general waste bin.
There really isnt any excuse .....it doesnt matter what you think about global warming , surely is is common sense to not waste the earths resources. So in answer to your question I think it can only be good:)

JennyR68

We've had fornightly collections for ages. One week it's blue bin and garden waste. The next green bin. If only we had glass collection, that would be great. The only vermin we have is a little mouse family who come to nick the bird food, totally un-bin related and very cute. :-)

A._Badger

'Scare stories' eh? Last summer, on a very hot day, driving through Kent on the way to visit a client, I listened to a local radio station phone-in, where outraged residents were complaining about vermin and flies, while a 'Green' apologist tried to tell the callers they were imagining things and there were no problems with fortnightly collections.

That rather summed-up the argument to me: experience ranged against dogma.

And even if that were not the case, there is always the small matter of democracy. Who (apart from a tiny number who voted for the Green Party) has actually voted in favour of this imposition?

'Green' policies are forced on people by stealth - often engineered by wholly unelected quangos and council officers. If (and it's a very big 'if') the UK votes for a 'Green' Party government, then this sort of policy can, at least, be said to have a mandate.

Until then, it is a noisy minority (albeit one endlessly promoted by the BBC) forcing its opinions on the rest of us.

Baileys_Babe

We have general waste on weeks 1 & 3, recycling on weeks 2 & 4 and glass also collected on week 4.

As a family we generate very little rubbish and recycle everything we can. We maybe third fill our general waste bin at most and our recycling bin varies from half full to 2 bins (we have an arrangement to use a neighbours if they have any space on collection day). Each house is only allowed 1 general waste bin, 1 recycling bin and 1 glass colection box.Which means if households are discouraged from recycling once they get so much, so families are then putting recyclables in the general waste bin. Our authority is also very limited in the range it recycles compared to other local authorities.

Fortnightly collection is fine if they actually collect, when we had snow at the end of last year/beginning of this year we had no collection of rubbish for 8 weeks as well as failing to collect our streets rubbish/recycling for the last 5 weeks, then we have to ring up to report and they eventually collect some time in the next fortnight.

As a rule I have no problem with fortnightly collection, just wish our LA could manage that.

jackieb

We've had fortnightly collections for a few years now. For a family of 6 all we got was a black box for all our recycling - glass, plastic and tins - we got a sack for papers but I haven't seen anyone lately still using a sack - they all blew away! I had to ask the council for another box and even then i'm taking my own recycling to the skip or Tesco between fortnightly collections.

I bought myself another wheelie bin for general waste. Sometimes I fill 2 in a fortnight, othertimes it's just the one.

Then there was the uproar when it was discovered that our local council had been dumping some of the recycling at the general dump!

paulwf

Alternative weeks for recycling and rubbish works absolutely fine for us. The trick is to clean and recycle absolutely everything that you can, so the majority of bin waste is general mixed packaging and plastics that aren't accepted in recycling. Our neighbours that have problems with the scheme just chuck everything in the general rubbish, as they aren't recycling they aren't washing tins and jars out first so of course they have problems.

If only we had a larger garden then we would compost too, so then there would be zero food waste for "vermin" to get excited about. Of course it helps that we're veggie, if you dump dead animal carcases in the bin and need weekly collections then you should pay a supplement on your council tax for this IMHO

I lived in Sweden for a while and in blocks of flats they would have waste sheds to separate all types of recycling, and as this included compostable food waste we would only fill one small carrier bag with rubbish in a week without any effort to be green.

noncom_2

Mr Badger - you obviously have pretty strong anti-Green views. That's your right, although I personally (based on the weight of scientific evidence, not some general tree-hugging persuasion) think you are profoundly wrong.

But to suggest that the results of a radio phone-in constitute a reasonable sample on which to base an opinion is ludicrous. If there's a phone-in on rubbish collection, then obviously people who have a major problem (eg rats) will be much more motivated to call the show. And of the cross section of calls which come into the studio, the producers are bound to pick the most lurid examples they can find from the most vociferous callers, because it "gets the debate going". (I work for a radio broadcaster, so I've been in studio observing the sometimes abysmal editorial decisions that are made).

So, yes, you will hear from Mr/Ms Angry Of Sutton Coldfield who saw a rat last week and links it (rightly or wrongly) with the frequency of rubbish collection. You will also hear from Mr/Ms Treehugger who wants to believe that adopting Green policies has no downside at all, because (too often in the mind of journalists) extreme polarised arguments equals democratic debate.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that what you are hearing is representative of a real situation at all.

FWIW. our council collects black bags once a week, and also either Garden Waste or Recyclables (glass, plastic, paper) on alternate weeks. Works fine for us.

Mids_Costcutter

noncom wrote: »

Mr Badger - you obviously have pretty strong anti-Green views. That's your right, although I personally (based on the weight of scientific evidence, not some general tree-hugging persuasion) think you are profoundly wrong.

But to suggest that the results of a radio phone-in constitute a reasonable sample on which to base an opinion is ludicrous. If there's a phone-in on rubbish collection, then obviously people who have a major problem (eg rats) will be much more motivated to call the show. And of the cross section of calls which come into the studio, the producers are bound to pick the most lurid examples they can find from the most vociferous callers, because it "gets the debate going". (I work for a radio broadcaster, so I've been in studio observing the sometimes abysmal editorial decisions that are made).

So, yes, you will hear from Mr/Ms Angry Of Sutton Coldfield who saw a rat last week and links it (rightly or wrongly) with the frequency of rubbish collection. You will also hear from Mr/Ms Treehugger who wants to believe that adopting Green policies has no downside at all, because (too often in the mind of journalists) extreme polarised arguments equals democratic debate.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that what you are hearing is representative of a real situation at all.

FWIW. our council collects black bags once a week, and also either Garden Waste or Recyclables (glass, plastic, paper) on alternate weeks. Works fine for us.

Fully agree with your comments on radio phone-ins, I guess a good producer should try and obtain a real range of opinions (not just extreme views on either side)? One of the most amusing comments I heard on a phone-in on rubbish collection frequencies on the vermin issue was "I'm yet to see a rat strong enough to lift up the lid on my wheelie bin!"

You don't say though whether you would be happy to switch to alternate weekly collections in Birmingham, especially right now to save money? And do you think it would be necessary for the council to provide wheelie bins to do that?

noncom_2

I don't think I'd particularly object to bi-weekly collections. We would need a bigger bin though. I don't think a wheely bin would be appropriate for us in terms of the slope of our garden path up to the house, and we don't really have anywhere to store it away from the front of the house. Another normal bin would be fine - our binmen collect the black bags directly from them.

If it's necessary for Councils to save money (and for most of them it is, and nobody really wants to see Council Tax going up more than necessary) then I think things like this have to be tried. But I do think that alongside the move to fewer collections there should be a proper education programme for how to create less waste in the first place - many people (and we're not entirely blameless in this ourselves) throw away more than should be necessary with a bit more care. At the end of the day, whether the stuff is collected once a week or once a fortnight, it ends up in the same landfill, so anything that can be done to reduce it is a good thing.