Wheelie bins

We have 4. Blue for landfill, Brown for garden and kitchen rubbish, Grey for paper and green for plastics and tins. We also have a little brown one that lives in the kitchen with biodegradable liners - this is for all food waste, including bones and eggshells, teabags etc. I must admit that I was a bit fed-up when the little brown one was introduced, but it actually works well, because as soon as it's full, you just drop the bag into the Brown bin outside. 4 large bins do take up a lot of space outside though.....! I know we have to be careful of pollution (obviously) but there was a lot to be said for having a bonfire down the bottom of the garden now and again!

We have two bin's here on The Wirral,a green one for normal waste and a
brown one for recyclable's there is also on in the communial garden which is brown where we put any garden cuttings,there is honestly no more space for
anything else,it would have to go on the roof!!

we have 5!
1.Black wheelie bin for rubbish,
2.small brown bin for food,
3.black box for tins, jars, batteries and foil,
4.white 'bag' for plastics and
5. green wheelie bin for garden waste - admittedly I pay for this one as we have lawns, hedges and the rabbit hutch waste but I consider it worth it.

Heather, five is a lot of bins! We have three - black for household waste, green for garden waste, and a blue one which is for glass, plastic and cans, with a blue box for paper and card. There have, however, been many complaints about the weight of the box when full, so those who wish may switch blue usage to suit their convenience. We find the green bin particularly useful, though they have not been introduced in all parts of the city. DD, who has a bigger garden than me, has to make do with green sacks for garden waste which are not particularly convenient. Then there are people who have green bins who have no garden! I hope we don't get any more - we are lucky to be able to keep them in the garage, but they can be a bit of an eyesore if you're stuck for space.

We have green bags for garden waste, green box for recycling (including plastics) a mini brown bin for food waste and a large wheelie bin for landfill. The garden waste and landfill is collected every other week. The system was muddily to start with but now seems to work reasonably well.

We have two bins one grey for landfill one brown for garden waste, 2 blue boxes for paper and bottles glass and plastic. You are not allowed to put other green waste in the brown bin like cabbage leaves or apple cores as in the words of the council ' they may have been contaminated by meat'. I cant remember the last time I wiped my apple round a pork chop before eating it. Presumably if I discard cabbage leaves in the garden before taking them in the kitchen they could go in the bin but once in the kitchen where I leave all that raw meat hanging about - who knows!!! Such is the wisdom of Melton Mowbray Borough Council.

PS Before someone tells me I do appreciate that cooked food shouldn't go in the compost or brown bin

I so hate wheelie bins, empty or full, they take up so much space and look horrible. Our council, Colchester, supplies sacks. Black for non-recyclable waste, which we get very little of. Clear for paper/card and mixed plastics, which are collected on alternate weeks. We also have 4 re-usable sacks for green waste, we only put stuff in there that i do not wish to have in my compost heap. I think the system is great, most of the time we do not have full sacks around the garden, much less obtrusive than wheelie bins.
The green waste is composted on an industrial scale, the temperatures reach kill off anything, much better than my own compost heap. We can the purchase the finished compost, I had 3 ton last year, it is excellent and totally weed free.
Waste is one job that Colchester council handles very well.

Greenmoss - how strange that we live in the same county but have different bins: we have grey for landfill; blue for paper and cardboard and brown for garden waste each of which is emptied fortnightly - blue ones today and black and brown next week and so on. Plastic bottles, glass and cans, which we store in large garden buckets in the kitchen (a real pain as they take up so much room) we have to take to the local recycling centre which is ok if you have a car; no wonder some people put everything into the black bin. If the lids are not properly shut, they don't empty the bins in case their operatives injure themselves - whatever happened to 'Dustman's' leather gloves? I do wonder what we pay our Council Tax for as we have 2 street lights in the whole street and as it is unadopted we have to pay for its maintenance anyway. The road sweeper was sacked years ago and the drains overflow everytime it rains - which is often!

Three here. grey landfill, red recycling, green garden.

Its when you get it wrong that's the worse and you have to fish it out again.

It appears that waste collection is a local council issue rather than a county one.
I forgot that Colchester also collect glass, tins and clothing separately on a fortnightly cycle.
If we are thorough with our segregation of waste, we get very little non-recyclable waste each week, usually one kitchen bin bag a week.
We do compost everything that we can, I even encourage my neighbour to use my compost heap, my veg can use all the compost I cam make.

We have three black for general rubbish, brown for garden waste and green for cardboard, glass and plastic. They are thinking of changing again though
Blue - maybe they will use that for glass alone.

We don't have wheelie bins in the town where I live, mainly because of the network of back lanes which are not suitable for the large vehicles needed to empty them. (I do have one in my tiny backyard so that black sacks don't get torn to bits by my cats, but use it only for storing them and lugging them out of the back gate on the weekly collection day.) The council provides a box for glass jars and bottles and bags for paper and cardboard, collected fortnightly. Everything else goes into black sacks. Before you all recoil at this apparently un-green approach , the town also has what is supposed to be a state-of-the-art recycling centre which sorts the contents of the black sacks, removing anything that can be recycled. I assume this is mostly a mechanical process, but really don't want to think about all those disposable nappies and cat litter mixed up with cans and plastic bottles. However it works, it seems to be quite efficient.

I am quite content to recycle - we recycled even before we had an assortment of bins and I have always had a composter. What bothers me is that I keep hearing and that councils are finding the amounts of material being collected difficult to cope with - plastics in particular - and are having to dispose of it in landfill anyway because they can't store it, which, if it is true, rather defeats the object. In this city most general household waste is disposed of at an incineration plant (which they insist is eco friendly!) and the heat produced is then recycled to heat a local complex of council flats, so at least some good is coming out of it I suppose (there have to be some compensations for living near an incinerator!). I once asked whether the compost produced from our green waste collections could be made available to the public, but was told no, it was only to be used on municipal green spaces. Shame. I also wish that someone would get their head round the plastic problem as there seem to be quite a lot of plastic items which we are not allowed to recycle so what happens to them?

2 here (Borders)
Black..landfill
black/blue lid.....card, paper, plastics and tins....we always fill this one even though just the 2 of us.
collected alternate weeks.
enough for anyone me thinks.
We don't get a green garden waste bin as we live out in the country.....and the farmer collects that from the field next to our cottage.

Wheelie bins are so unsightly when left at the front of houses ...sometimes on the pavement.

artygran - our council takes away our compostable stuff, then sells it back to us as compost for £2.20 a bag.

We have 1. Grey Lid...general rubbish 2. Brown Lid...garden waste 3. Blue Box..cans and glass bottles 4. Red Bag....plastic (bottles only) 5. Grey small bin...food waste then transferred into 6. Green Bin 7. Green Bag...cardboard and 8. Blue Bag for newspapers and waste paper. We also have a bag for recylcing old clothing etc. PHEW!
So that is a total of 9 if we use them all..... now need a as it is too early for

I am not surprised you need a after all that lot Lucid. I had forgotten the indoor one for food waste.

Crikey Lucid - however do you manage - I think I'd be totally confused with that lot!

Blimey Lucid, we wouldn`t even have room in our yard for that lot!

The positive things about the bins: animals can't rip them open; encourages recycling. The negatives: difficult to manhandle down the drive - one of these days I'll end up on it, in it or under it; smell - it's no good saying wash them out, they're so jolly tall; space - they take up so much space and don't look very attractive although I understand you can buy a bin cosy or some such. Also remembering what can go in each taxes my brain and also which bins go out on which week - we have a fortnightly collection, in spite of the Government recommending weekly for food waste. Apparently some people in our area have received naughty stickers for bunging in the wrong item in the wrong bin. Wouldn't a carrot be better than a stick? But that's our council for you.

My kitchen is now an assortment of food leftovers bin, peelings bin for compost, a carrier bag for cereal packets in which to put brown bagged food waste to stop it falling through the bottom - yuck - and another carrier holding cat tins, yogurt pots etc so I don't have to venture out into the rain every 5 minutes. Phew, I need a .

It is a complicated business for sure! We have the same as lucid. I can cope with it and am lucky enough to be able to put the wheely bins round the side of my house and all the other boxes and bags in the garage. Where people have no choice but to keep them in the front garden, or even on the pavement in some cases they are a real eyesore. Black bags are a problem as they get ripped open by foxes and the contents (sometimes very unpleasant!) strewn around.
It's the very elderly I feel particularly sorry for, it is so much for them to cope with. My MIL is 90 and lives on her own and I think it is really hard for her. Mentally she can cope with what goes where, but she is physically frail and disabled so the actually handling of the stuff is really difficult. I'm terrified she is going to fall one day, it's almost impossible to move big bags of stuff and bins when you use a walking frame.
In the 'good old days' our dustmen were marvellous, they would take anything that you put out by the old fashioned dustbin - rolls of carpet, the odd small bit of furniture etc. And if you forgot to put your bin down the bottom of the drive or you were on holiday, they would come up and fetch it from the side of the house. Needless to say they used to get a good tip from me at Christmas! It was so easy, but I do accept that we couldn't carry on like that with everything going into landfill. I just feel that there has to be an easier way.

We have a green bin for what DD2 calls absolute rubbish (landfill), a blue one for recyclables (plastics, paper, metal), a black bin for glass. Those are all wheelies and I wheel them 200yds down our rough track/steep hill to get to the nearest road. In winter I wear crampons so I don't slip on the ice. When the bins have been emptied whoever has the car tows them back up the hill to the house making a hell of a racket (the fun part ) on the bumpety-ump part. Everybody else in the village was supplied with a small green bin and bags for food waste but deliverers can't be arsed don't bother to walk up our hill so we haven't got one. Not that we need it — we've got chickens and a green cone (see: www.eco-worrier.net/composting-greencone.html) which we've had since way before councils had a think (perforce) about recycling leftovers. Then there's the bag in the spare bedroom for rags. The school can earn money collecting these.

Oh yes, and an old builder's bucket in the kitchen for food waste (mouldy cabbage leaves, teabags, coffee grounds, etc) that can go on one of our normal garden compost heaps, of which, currently, we have four. The garden is on a steep hill so we have one at the bottom, one at the top and two in the middle.

We've got used to managing the assorted different bins/bags now. Do you also live in N-u-L then groovygranny? I agree about the difficulties for the elderly - it took me ages to explain it all to my Mum (who is in her 80's) and she still finds it confusing. On collections days it is difficult to walk down the pavement for all the bins/ bags. I think the 'bin' men (are we allowed to call them that?) should get a medal for the work they do.
Although I do like the idea that our food waste goes to an anaerobic digester to make electricity and the garden waste is composted.