Easiets/cheapest way to get rid of garden waste?

[ARW]

Just north of Manchester and Liverpool.

[Mentalguy2k8]

lol!

They cost 70 quid a year here (or 60 for her as she's ancient) which works out about 2 pounds something a collection, I'm not sure if that's cheaper than driving 5 miles to the tip or not. Apparently the bin is 240 litres which (from what I can make out) is the same size as her existing wheelie bins. It also means spending hours sawing up logs to fit into it.

Sod it, a bonfire it is.

[Mentalguy2k8]

Prohibitively expensive... the B&Q type affordable ones don't seem to shred anything bigger than a pencil.

[Mentalguy2k8]

Posh Surrey. Well, Surrey.

[Tim Streater]

Here in Kent we have one included. Emptied fortnightly. We're about to get weekly food waste collection.

[ARW]

Do it properly. Have a few beers whilst you are doing it:-)

[newshound]

When my wife wants to use her (private) van she has to phone up in advance, turn up with a passport and a bill, and I think is only allowed to do one trip a week. But the point is, they *do* have a phone contact system where you can confirm the exact ground rules first. I would have

*thought* that if you phone up and explain the situation they might give you some sort of one-off dispensation. You might need to have something like your own utility bill to show that you live a distance away but do have the same name. Failing that, try her councillor or Age Concern?

[SteveW]

Around here they're 240 litre, no extra charge and are just changing to weekly collection - as we are now having our smaller (140 litre) general waste bins emptied once a fortnight and we are allowed to put food waste into the garden waste bin as long as its unwrapped or in compostable bags. We also have two more 240 litre bins that are collected once a month - one for paper and cardboard, the other for glass bottles, plastic bottles, tin-foil, tins and drinks cans.

In our case we actually have a 240 litre rather than a 140 litre general waste bin, as families of 5 or more are allowed the larger bin.

SteveW

[newshound]

I have a Bosch ATX rapid which was less than £150. *Seemed* to be highly recommended by gardening NGs etc, except that the buggers had a minor change of serial number in swapping from an industrial gear type mincer to a spinning blade.

That said, the spinning blade is very good indeed as long as you have a sharp blade, does 10 mm just like that. Havn't managed to sharpen them again successfully, it has an induction hardened edge.

Gives about a 10x volume reduction.

[ARW]

Well that married daughters unable to help their parents then:-)

[D.M.Chapman]

Heh. "Here" in Kent (where Here=Folkestone) we can have a garden waste bin but we have to pay for it (37.50 this year, renewal was a few weeks back).

A normal sized wheelie bin and it's collected once a fortnight along with the purple wheelie bin for tins, plastic and glass, the black box for card and paper, and the green food bin.

The other week they pick up our landfill (wheelie bin number 3).

Scheme seems to work well but the front gardens around here are now full of various colour bins :-(

Darren

[Tim Streater]

Canterbury.

Not dissimilar here.

[John Rumm]

You can hire them - including quite serious petrol driven ones that will swallow whole branches at a time.

The "rapid" ones are good for green leafy stuff. The "quiet" ones are better on woody stuff. The old quiet ones used a helical "blade" to both draw the material in and segment / crush it. The newer ones use a pair of meshed cogs with sharp teeth. Not sure which works best since I have only tried the former. Its ok, but easy to clog with to much leafy stuff. For woody stuff it will shred stuff up to broom handle thickness easy enough.

Indeed.

[John Rumm]

Ours went the other way. They used to have a scheme where you could pay extra for a green bin. Then they got the recycling religion in a big way and gave one to everyone. The green one being designed for food waste as well as garden.

[John Rumm]

Yup, three of them here as well. Original grey full sized one is now recyclables (with a fairly broad spectrum of stuff that can go in), slightly narrower purple lid for rubbish, and smaller green for food/garden. The green is emptied every week, the other two in alternation.

[polygonum]

What an absolute pain all this is. Mother ill at present and not at home

- went to her house and did a few things. Then realised that I had no idea about what could go in which bin, when they are collected, etc., etc. Maybe she or I should have made notes of everything, but it is not always uppermost in your mind.

And Sunday afternoon is not the best time to try to find out.

[Mentalguy2k8]

So far she's got a black (landfill) wheelie, a small brown contraption for food waste, a green crate for paper/plastic bottles recycling and some kind of big "white woven sack" that has to be used for the other recycling, cardboard boxes or something. For the food waste, they give you a small brown "caddy" for the kitchen and a bigger one to put out for collection but you have to bag everything you put in them. They stink like nobody's business.

[Mentalguy2k8]

Then I probably *will* set the fences alight !

[Mentalguy2k8]

Even in this thread, the number of different combinations of bins, crates, bags, coloured lids etc is confusing, and different councils seem to have different ideas about what goes in where. At home I have a black bin and a green one, simple.

[harry]

I compost all my garden waste and also take in some neighbour's waste. Small branches go through the shredder.