The new bin collections

We were given blue wheelie bins and blue boxes. The bins were for bottles and cans, plastics and glass – which is mostly lightweight stuff when it’s empty. The boxes, without wheels were for newspapers. If you had a morning paper, and The Star in the evening, plus weekend papers and the excessive junk mail we receive these days, and maybe some cardboard from packaging, not only were the boxes not big enough but they weighed a ton.

The council, in their usual cack handed way had decided that it was OK for the old, and people with disabilities, to bend to ground level and pick up the boxes full of paper and stagger down their drives with it on collection day, while lightweight empty cans, empty plastic and glass bottles, and other plastic items could be wheeled to the pavement. It took a public outcry, much of it in The Star, before they gave people the option of how to use the blue Bins and boxes. We read a lot, and opted to put the two weeks’ worth of newspapers etc. into the wheelie bin, which made life a lot easier.

We rarely fill a blue box with tins and bottles etc, during the two-week collection period.

Now it seems we are to have 240 litre bins to replace the blue boxes, whether we need one that size or not.

Based on our current usage, it would probably take us well over six months to fill one of these bins.

We don’t need another 240 litre, murky brown, eyesore stuck in our front garden.

I suspect it takes a hell of a lot of empty tins and bottles to reach 240 litres. Why not have smaller wheelie bin options for those who do not need such a big bin?

I am not sure how much this new system is going to cost, as it’s a lot of new bins to pay for, and I wonder what’s going to happen if the council fail to find a contractor who will do the job cheaper while being forced , by their contract, to pay the living wage?

The contractors may have problems finding staff willing to work the longer working days that the council are proposing. Contractors are profit makers, and if they find their profits falling then you can bet the service will suffer, and probably the first thing that they will cut is staffing levels to save money, which will again impact on the service, and the staff remaining.

On a political note, we all know that this is another chapter in the cutting of money to local councils, along with all the other cuts taking place. This is because it’s a Tory Government that we probably would not have if the Labour Party had listened to the people on leaving Europe.

I am one of the many who chose not to vote Labour because of their slavish servitude to mass immigration.

I did not vote Tory either, but many did because of the promise of a referendum on Europe.

Many others, like me, voted for neither party.

Unfortunately this spread votes very thinly amongst non-Tory parties, and the Tories got in via the back door.

If Labour had made the same promise to the electorate, they might well have won the Election.

Daft as it sounds, that is why your bin service, along with so many other things in this country, is suffering.

People knew what to expect from the Tories and they still considered them a better choice than Labour, and voted for UKIP and others allowing Cameron to march back into Downing Street.

by email