Used to be at one time we had one (metal) bin for rubbish that was collected weekly and you just put everything in it. Increases in the packaging used by supermarkets etc soon meant we ended up with bigger bins, but still weekly collections. Then came the obsession with recycling (generally a good thing) and extra bins and containers were added to the mix, being collected fortnightly (in my case) Somewhere in that we lost the free collection of large items of waste and either had to sort it out ourselves or pay the council to do it for us, it had to be the council, they wont allow vans or pickups into the waste depot, just cars. I now have 2 bags, one for paper/card one for cans, bottles (plastic and glass) and a brown wheely for garden rubbish which hardly gets used as I hate gardening. Oh and the rest of the rubbish is collected in black sacks weekly, so I guess I'm lucky there. Others are not so lucky...
Express.
COUNCIL chiefs were branded “over the top” yesterday for making householders sort their rubbish into as many as nine bins.
A nationwide study revealed the “shocking disparity” in Britain’s approach to recycling with households being required to use anything from one to nine bins.
And failure to comply can incur fines of up to £100.
The TaxPayers’ Alliance said the average number of bins residents are required to use is four. But 136 councils use five bins, 58 use six and 21 use seven.
Adding to the confusion, each council has its own system of weekly or fortnightly collections.
As I said, I'm one of the lucky ones and no this isn't a dig at Medway Council (other than the waste depot and vans) as I know who exactly is at the root of all this messing about, as do the Taxpayers Alliance.
Councils face heavy EU fines if they do not reduce the amount of rubbish sent to landfill sites, so they are pushing for dramatic increases in recycling.
Caught between a rock and a hard place as people like me will take them to task for raising Council Tax to pay for fines incurred because they can't recycle more and take them to task about over complicating the systems they use to do it.
Yet in the end it boils down to following EU regs and as ever we end up paying for it and so the resentment grows whilst our political classes rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and hoping no-one notices it's sinking, instead of launching the lifeboat by way of an in or out referendum.
EU regulations are wrecking this country and strangling our businesses and councils in red tape, it's time and past time we left.
2 annotations:
I quietly give thanks that we don't have this imbecility over here.
We are about to get given another bin. A SECOND yellow one. Well, yellow in Leipzig, I have just been told in Berlin they will be orange.
They are for electronic, metal, and.... no one seems to know what else.
So that will be seven in total. But then. They are emtied between two and four times per week.
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