Why are local councils so short sighted?

Their houses are worth more than mine :-)

Only 11% !!!!

That probably means they have less money, it's all going on the mortgage.

(On paper I've done pretty well out of house price inflation. In practice this means the house I live in is worth a lot more than it used to be, but I can't spend the money unless I want to be homeless.)

Andy

Perhaps, though, many people with gardens only need the green waste collection maybe four or five times a year -- i.e. only after they'd got around to pruning this years overgrown tree, or accumulated enough grass clippings, or raked up this autumn's leaves. Then it's not seen as ?40 for a years worth of weekly collections, which might well seem like good value; instead it's more like ?8 *per* collection used, which is rather more likely to be resented. Probably being able to buy pre-paid garden waste bags would address this issue, but are they actually available?

#Paul

Around here, about 1/3 of the green waste comes from gardening, while

If we reported a collection missed, a follow-up collection would be carried out within two working days.

As it goes in the same bin as food waste, a year round collection is necessary. Anyway leaves blow into the gardens well into autumn.

Which is great if you are a gardener, but many people just have lawns and a few flowers for decoration and are not gardeners.

SteveW

Here, we are specifically told that meat is allowed in our green (food and garden waste) bin. It all goes for industrial, anaerobic composting.

That's the same here.

SteveW

It varies between councils - ours repurposed the black bin (240l) as a plastic bottle, glass bottle, tin and foil bin. Added a blue bin (240l) for card and paper, a grey bin (120l) for general waste (or 240l for households with 5 or more residents) and a green bin for food and garden waste.

It's not that difficult, it is simply that most facilities have not invested in the technology that can do it.

It is perfectly possible to detect black trays, but most of the facilities haven't installed the equipment to do it.

My experience with Sainsbury's light green trays (one of our sons has a very restricted taste in foods and only likes their Spaghetti Bolognese they all prefer homemade, but my wife is ill and sometimes there is just too much else to do), is that unlike black ones, they are far more likely to split as you lift them and scald your fingers.

SteveW

I sometimes think it must be some jobsworth who makes up the rules about what can and cannot be put into green waste. While some item may not be ideal for a small scale home composting industrial scale composting can cope with much more variety of items.

The composting here is good - all food, plus garden waste. The prohibition for pizza boxes with grease on is for the cardboard recycling bin.

SteveW

We have two composting caddies. One is for home composting and is only for uncooked food, no meat. The other is for the council composter.

We have four wheelie bins; garden waste, cardboard/paper, tins/plastic/ foil, and non-recyclable!

Quite. The 'green (waste) bin' is no more guaranteed to be green in colour than the 'cardboard and paper' bin is made out of paper mache or the glass bin to be see though. ;-)

It's only a left brainer that would assume that when we are talking about 'green bins' or 'green waste' it's actually / always / only green in colour. ;-(

No ability to think outside the box///bin. ;-(

Cheers, T i m

In article snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk>, michael adams <mjadams25@ukonline.?.invalid> writes

Well up until now our local Conservative run council has managed to provide a free green waste collection fortnightly from Feb to Dec. Now it is Labour/Independent controlled we await next year's bills with some trepidation. With a Labour PCC our police tax has gone up by 20% in

In article <021220192130438640% snipped-for-privacy@greenbee.net, Tim Streater snipped-for-privacy@greenbee.net writes

Causing more river flooding.

I don't think PG tips bags use plastic any longer because they disintegrate and discharge the tea far more quicker than Twinings or Sainsburys bags do.

Using one tea bag for two cups of (not too strong) tea using PG tips can be messy.

My ex MOT tester neighbour chucks old brake pads, air filters and pollen filters into the blue bin intended for plastic, glass, cans, paper and cardboard.

You can have as many rules as you like but unless you have an army of council bin snoopers, a significant minority of the public will just wave two fingers to the regs.

Precisely. Like adding grass cuttings full of systemic weedkiller to the compost bin...

DO NOT BUY COUNCIL COMPOST

Use a teapot then.

There are some people that you basically have to prosecute before they will behave reasonably (and sometimes not even then). The same mentality drives out into the countryside to throw away their old furniture :(

There are no systemic weedkillers on sale to the general public that will persist across a hot composting cycle to a significant degree. The same is not true of agricultural weedkillers where there have been some bad problems with highly persistent weedkillers in horse manure.

Aminopyralid does sometimes cause problems but it is commercial agriculture grazing where it is used and not on domestic lawns.