Can I chuck unused wheelie bins in a skip?

Jan 17, 2019 Last reply: 5 years ago 61 Replies

I can't find an an answer to this, so if anyone knows....



I've 3 wheelie bins that are unused and I want to dispose of, and i've a skip.



I can't see any problem chucking them in a skip, but then i'm not the council.



Freecycle them. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who would make good use of them.

Check your council website they should have a collection scheme so they can be recycled. Our council offered to collect unwanted garden waste bins after imposing a collection charge for the waste.

Richard

Presumably they're the property of the council? I'd ask them to retrieve them, or e.g. if in future they decide to alter the scheme and want them back because of $REASONS, they might bill you for them.

Sticky wicket here, probably not your property to dispose of.

Phone the council and ask ?

If you do skip them and they later ask, act stupid and say "what bins? we put them out years ago and never saw them again" although admittedly the possibility of them worrying about where your bins went is a remote one.

Got to ask though, why skip them, they can be very useful , if not to you to someone, free-ad in local paper?

Because it will end up like the quantity of blue mains water pipe I tried to give away, plenty of interest but nobody seeing through to actually picking it up!

And someone ordered this skip on Tuesday without warning me, i haven't filled it yet, and miraculously neither has anyone else. Despite it being on a car park behind some shops.

I think most councils will collect them for free, but you could start by leaving them outside with a notice on them asking anyone who needs one to take it.

If the 3 wheeelie bins were allocated to an address for which you personally are paying the Community Charge , and you haven't reported them as missing then I'd be very wary of disposing of them without giving the Council adequate notice, a fact which you can subsequently prove,

Again what the Council might regard as "adequate notice" may be a matter of interpretation by a Court.

Basically money is tight. And any Council which had the opportunity to charge Community Charge Payers the full retail price for 3 wheelie bins (as charged by a Hi-Fi supplier for instance) would doubtless jump at the chance.

Whether they bother to check or not is another matter. But if you should have had

3 wheelie bins and didn't get them, or have subsequently had them stolen then this should have been reported to the Council at the time. If it weasn't then as far as the Council are concerned you should stil be in possession of the three wheelie bins

michael adams

...

soup expressed precisely :

Yep!

Our new green bin soon lost its lid in the truck which empties them, I rang the council asked them to supply a new lid and they dropped off a complete new bin. I repurposed the lid-less one as a handy building sand store, kept under cover at the back of the garden.

So why wasn't this reported at the time ?

And supposing some public spirited Council Tax payer just happens to notify the Council of this skip with the three wheelie bins in it ? Which quite possibly, to their way of thinking, the Council should come and retrieve. A fact that the OP might be completely unaware of the time.

What is going to be your convenient lie in that instance, when confronted with the facts ?

That the wind just happened to blow them into the skip ? And then you just happened to forget to report them missing ?

There's no doubt that lying through one's teeth may indeed confer positive benefits in some instances, at least until found out.

But in this instance, all the OP need do is to inform the Council.

He could have course have informed the Council at any time; only the question of disposing of the wheelie bins only entered his head at all with the arrival of the skip. Which isn't the best solution for the reasons given.

michael adams

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All? You've plainly never phoned our council.

Anyway curiosity got the better of me and I have my answer. It turns out our council want to come and collect old unused bins, they will call me back to make an appointment!

The s*it they claim to have no money for but they'll arrange appointments to drive around collecting battered old bins.

The mind boggles!

Compromise? Leave them beside the skip then if anyone wants them, they can take them. Someone might think they are part of the skip process anyway.

Many councils use bye laws to impose fines on residents such as consistently overloading bins, leaving bins out on non-collection days and I should imagine includes disposing of council property. What happens if you do not pay the fines I do not know? However it would not be beyond the bounds of becoming a criminal offence then.

Richard

Ask the council if they want them, if they are undamaged and belong to you, and aare not colours the council use, you will find lots of people might buy them if they are cheap enough for their garden waste etc. I've even been told that some people cut a panel out of the side and end up with a wheelable compost bin. I guess you would nned to bore holes in it though.

Brian

Name one Local Authority in the UK where homeowners are required to purchase replacement wheelie bins in the event of their reporting their own bin having been lost or stolen ? Rather than replacements being provided free of charge.

Which while it may allow the more enterprising if dishonest homeowner to re-use their original "lost" bin for some other purpose, is still preferable to encouraging a situation a where a flourishing black market in stolen wheelie bins could develop.

This however has nothing to do with a situation where a Council might identify a useful revenue stream, in charging homeowners for lost wheelie bins which were never reported to them.

Whereas if the OP reports these three wheelie bins as having been stolen, then all that will happen is that the Council will supply him with another three.

michael adams

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Fair enough; I stand corrected.

So that in the case of the OP, if he remembers having paid his local authority the full cost* of the three replacement bins, then he can safely dump them in the skip.

But if that were the case then I somehow doubt he would have needed to ask the question in the first place. Or are you going to argue about that, as well ?

michael adams

*Some local authorities do simply charge an administation fee; in which case, unlike with York the bin remains the Council's property.

...

Fill them with cardboard and set fire to them.

We have a bin whose acquisition a decade had its origins in a neighbour dispute by a relative and someone who kept thinking a right access of over a relatives driveway stretched to blocking it with a permanently stationed wheelie bin and other obstructions. The relative took direct action and we moved it two hundred miles away shortly after.

At the time the missis was wanting to experiment with making liquid compost from Comfrey leafs soaked in water for a few weeks, fitting a water butt tap to the wheelie bin makes it a good processor for this. Any one who has ever made this solution will know the odour is disgusting so just bunging leaves and water in the top as required and closing the lid and draining the liquid feed out from the tap keeps it to a minimum and when the time comes to empty the remaining sludge out it can be wheeled up to a spot as far away as possible or tipped onto a normal compost heap.

GH

I've just paid £50 to get one delivered by the council, so, yes, please freecycle any superfluous ones.

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