Be Excellent To Each Other

My bucket was unceremoniously deposited on my doorstep today.



It's a 23 litre bucket to go outside for collection, a 5 litre one to sit in the kitchen and be regularly emptied into the big one, and some handy instructions on how to use it.

Telegraph link

I am not a happy camper. Mrs Meaty's older sister has one in Brizzle, and it stinks to high heaven, especially in summer, and extra especially when they're all sitting outside waiting for the collection. I don't see what stops passing chavs from hurling the contents about either.

I've also read in the papers that many of the trial areas for these complained of rats, bugs and other undesirable things attracted by it.



This is now us. Green bin for waste, brown bin for recycling, green bags (blew away in the breeze) for garden waste, and now this stupid rat magnet.

I don't think this whole thing will work, it's yet another act of stupidity from this ridiculous government who doesn't take into account that in some parts of Europe, garbage is collected practically every day.

Has anyone else some experience in using these? Any tips on where to place it, keep it sealed and avoid the stench? Anyone else wishing they'd just fuck off, and go look up what the 'servant' part of 'civil servant' actually means? Because it doesn't mean rooting through my fucking bins trying to find a chicken bone or egg shell so you can fine me £100, you cunts.

What a load of rubbish.

We've had one for about ..... 2 or 3 months , the inside one is fine but needs cleaned out on a more regular basis than you'd normally clear a bin.

The outside one has a locking mechanism to keep animals out , our biggest problem with it is after its emptied the bin men leave them 'open' so in heavy rain i've came home to a puddle of sludge in the bottom of it

What a waste of time.

Me. For about two years, there's been a green and black bin outside my house. Sure, the green bin stinks... when you open it, other than that it's fine. I really don't think this is a big deal, and you can't deny it's better for the environment. Have you ever noticed the bin smelling when you come to my house?

And what were you doing with your food scaps before putting them in a green bin? Because if you were putting them in your black bin, they're pretty much going to smell in there too.

We've had one for about 6 months. I wrote to the Council to complain about the idea before they went ahead and did it, but was ignored. On the plus side ours doesn't smell, the exterior "bin" can be locked to keep vermin away and its collected weekly. On the negative side it's a hell of a lot more faff, more expense (you'll find yourself buying especially small bin liners for the caddy) and quite frankly a complete waste of time. I haven't, yet, been told that they'll start issuing fines if they find food waste in the general bin, but they'd better not try it. Of more concern at the moment is another stupid idea they have of putting RFID chips in bins and weighing them on collection - I've bought several rare-earth magnets to take care of the chips and will offer my RFID elimination services to the neighbourhood as and when it comes into force.

You people need your councils to *issue you with special containers and then empty them for you* before you'll bother composting food waste?

And then complain about it?

My council offers none of that stuff, you just have to do it yourself.

We've had recycling here in sunny Hackney for about 2-3 years now. We buy biodegradable bags that fit in the smaller one that are made from corn starch I think. Simply pull it out when full, tie up and put in the bigger one outside. The bags aren't cheap but it cuts down on the mess. The main problem we've had has been one of the dogs attempting to nick certain food wastes out of the smaller bin in the kitchen occasionally.

I don't think you're going to have a problem with kids throwing this stuff around - they don't go through your normal rubbish do they? What makes you think they're going to suddenly be interested in this bin?

If you keep your slop bucket in the freezer, it won't smell.

Admittedly I stopped using the slop bucket. I use one of the green bags DBSnappa mentioned if I have a lot of kitchen waste (and put it straight out if there's any meat in there), and if I just have a small amount of vegetable peelings or something I chuck them straight in the big bin outside.

The implementation of these schemes varies in quality, frequency and soundness of logic. Fundamentally thoguh, most of them are capable of being successful if everyone looks at the bigger picture. Even if we don't need to separate our waste for reuse it still makes good economic and practical sense to do so. Once a scheme, however flawed, is running as smoothly as possible improvements will serve to bring down costs so the authorities will be glad to look into them.

You can't factor chav involvement into a plan for something like this any infested area will have to make a sizeable community effort to badger the police into getting off their arses and doing something.

We've had food recycling in Cardiff for a while, and it's aces

We get biodegradable plastic bags (FREE!) for the kitchen, and when they get half-full or a bit smelly, just tie em off & shove em in the green bin outside (originally garden waste, but its all for the compost heaps anyway).

What with most packaging/paper going in one recycling thing, and food in the other, there really is not much left over for genuine rubbish. Just stuff that's dirtied, or non-recyclable plastics. We're lucky to fill a single black bag a week now (& it doesn't smell half as bad with no food waste in there).

I think the trick is that we get free biodegradable placky bags, so the 'slop bucket' doesn't get covered in food & go all smelly, but it does seriously drop the weight of non-recycled waste massively.

Did I mention that the bags are free, like prescriptions?

That won't work.

Also, is it really of concern? Whilst I applaud the effort to subvert Big Brother at any opportunity, wouldn't your time be better spent writing letters about ID cards and the DNA database and anti-terrorism laws or something instead?

Rather than at patently harmless schemes designed to reduce waste and improve our environment?

Just saying

And this is WHY people vote BNP.

On a more serious note, we've got a green composting bin thing that is at the back of the garden. Vegetable and plant matter waste goes in there and stuff that goes to the bins outside is cut down massively. We use an old ice cream tub which gets filled up during the morning, and then emptied before I leave, and again in the evening. It gets dishwashed between these times (which negates smells and environmental benefits).

If you're worried about Chavs hurling shit at each other, then move.

It's not the vegetable and plant matter that smells though, as a general rule - it's meat, which you can't compost.

He lives outside of civilisation so probably has a pig in the garden to cope with that side of things.

Can't you hurl the meat into the chav-pit and let them get on with it?

Or, not buy meat. Or, buy it, but then eat it.

Sensible policies for a sensible future.

I'm referencing bones/the scraps left attached to bones/gizzards and shizzle.



Naturally I ignored the first suggestion.

What do they do with the slops? I would imagine most people throw their meat waste in there too and so it can't be used for compost.

Any ideas? Pig food?

We compost, and have been since we moved it... still not used any of the compost yet, but I need to finish the riased bed then I can use the contents!!

Sausages, burgers, turkey twizzlers...

I don't think that's allowed any more!

You can of course compost meat, but in an uncontrolled setting at the end of peoples gardens is probably going to cause problems.

So they are probably just doing that, centrally.
They could also, once the collection side is running smoothly, be using anaerobic digestion or some other form of gasification to produce electricity and heat - there's a huge amount of embodied energy in food waste.

Or they could just incinerate the fuck out of it.

Well it can be used but essentially it doesn't rot very well...... that's what I've been told any how and it really stinks and attracts things most people don't want.

Just looked it up on the council site and it says noooooo don't do it or place it in the garden waste. It appears how ever that kitchen scraps can be can be handled separately to create some sort of additional plant feed. Also "Organic waste is responsible for 70% of contamination in Land fills if it goes out with the trash ,so please do not do this"




That would explain quite a lot... nomnomnom

Couldn't they bury all the waste? That would solve the problem.. They could have dedicated sites that they fill with rubbish, and then when that's full.. simply move on to somewhere else... Like Tipton.

I just put everything in my kitchen bin like I always did, then empty the little white bags into my black wheelie bin just like I always have done since.... 1985 is stamped on the bin. Wow that's a long time ago!

Torfaen don't seem to give the slightest shit that my green bin has always been empty and is pristine.

I know I am a bad man but it saves third world dictators from having to put our "recycling" into 2 landfill sites and just using the one.

Your dogs' anal emissions overwhelm pretty much every other odour, unfortunately.



Nope. I don't see what's wrong with my composter which is already in the back garden. I sure as hell won't throw meat-related waste in there, though. Yuck!



My parents had an almost identical thing going in their kitchen of their own accord. FOR VEGETABLE WASTE ONLY. Don't they (government) get it? It's the rotting meat clinging to the bones that's the problem with this whole plan.

And how shit is the world in general when the government is now hiring people to go through your bins to make sure you haven't been naughty and thrown that uneaten chicken wing into the general waste? Mr T must be apoplectic.

Really? RE magnets fuck-up most electronics do-hickeys good and proper. I'll have to have a play - and maybe come up with some other means of disabling them. Perhaps a portable microwave emitter?



Is it harmless though, or is it the thin end of the wedge? I'm all for saving the planet, cutting emissions and reducing waste, but I don't think any of these "strategies" are designed to do any of that, but are designed to erode our civil liberties and provide a new source of tax revenue.

Can you imagine what will happen if and when they start charging you on the weight of your bin? You'll get people putting stuff in their neighbour's bins so that they don't incur the penalty! There'll be hordes of furtive bin-fillers operating by night, transferring rubbish from one bin to another! And to counter this there'll be a growth in Night-bin-watchmen! It'll all descend into chaos!

Levity aside, if we really want a reduction in waste we'll need a national strategy, not these half-arsed localised wallet emptiers. And that national strategy needs to target the cause of all the waste - the supermarkets and producers who over-package food.

(I have also written extensively to the Government, my MP and just about anyone else who'll listen (or at least has a postal address ) on the DNA database, Government IT projects in general, biometric passports and a whole host of other issues. Not that it'll make much difference, but at least they'll have a good reason to send the black helicopters after me )

It's their fault my lamb chops had a huge bone and a huge chunk of inedible fat?

Something's going wrong somewhere if you're normally buying lamb chops that don't have a bone.

No, a rare earth [strong] magnet might damage something which is sensitive to magnetism such as a hard disk, CRT monitor or old-fashioned credit card. It doesn't do anything to electronics in general.



No, it's got sod-all to do with civil liberties! Seriously, if that's what you're worried about there's loads of things massively further up the wedge already - complain about those, please!



As you've just demonstrated, charging the consumer is a pretty effective motivator. And you don't have to buy stuff that's overpackaged.

And I think you've overlooked another angle. Paying by weight is fairer. I *wish* we got charged by weight, because there's almost always a trivial amount of stuff, like one or two carrier bags worth of packaging in our wheelie bin when it's collected fortnightly. You probably couldn't even weigh it! And yet, we pay full whack on the council tax for bin collection, which is a lot, so we're effectively subsidising all the lazy bastards who don't recycle a thing, and all the families with hordes of offspring that produce their own weight in rubbish every waking hour.

So it would reduce waste (most people will think about it more and recycle more), and at least you'll pay in proportion to what you use, like virtually every other service in the modern world. A great idea IMHO.



And fair play to you sir!

No, but it is their fault that they throw away 2,000,000 tonnes of food every year.

It's definitely fairer in absolute terms, but then so was the poll tax.

You won't end up paying by weight. If anything, you'll end up paying by weight per occupant (even though you pay the same council tax as the family of six next door).

Partly their fault, and partly our fault. We insist on buying chicken breasts cut off the bone, even though that wastes loads of meat. What's the national market for chicken breasts compared to that for liver, or even thighs? Every 2 more breasts than thighs the nation buys because they don't like their food to ever look like it came from an animal means meat thrown away.

We've had a small composter for a while now. You can get special bio-degradable baggies to line it if cleaning it's too much of a bother. We empty it into the brown garden bin, but the problem lies in the very little gardening we do it never gets emptied, so we have a little pool of rotted slurry at the bottom of the bin instead.

In Ireland, well, in rural Kerry, the councils never got around to refuse collection. So people used to burn all their rubbish in the back yard (no, really!). Including plastics, tin cans, whatever. Really awful and not without consequences.

When they joined the EU, all of that had to stop, they banned burning stuff and private bin lorry operators appeared.

They usually charge by weight - there's a flat fee for the weekly collection and then per kilo of rubbish.

How it works is that the lorry has a weighing thing built into the wheelie-bin lifting mechanism, and a tag reader to identify the bin. So it ends up with a list of weight vs tag, recorded on a memory stick. The operator then fires that into a database which has tags corresponding to addresses and direct debit numbers and generates the bill. The operator is in turn charged per ton for landfill space.

Dead simple, and everyone seems really happy with it. And it's definitely encouraged people to take the heavy stuff out (bottles and paper etc) and recycle it.

The little slop bucket thing is laughable. I achieve the exact same thing by keeping a bowl lined with kitchen paper next to the sink. Vegetable peelings, tea bags, etc, go into it during the day, then the contents get slung into our green (compostable) wheely bin last thing at night. Quick wipe, new paper lining and it's good to go for the next day. There's no time for it to begin to smell.

Fuck no. Hard disks have rare earth magnets inside them.

I meant, err, floppy disk. Yes, that's it.

Anyway, it's not going to do anything to an RFID tag, was my point.

Fire will.

But then if it can't read the bin, it won't get collected....

Agree on a focused national strategy being needed beyond the milksop that is the recycle food waste bin, but I'm happy to use those frankly. I don't have any probems with it and I find that even in a houseshare of four its not much of a stress. Lets face it, twenty years from now with resource depletion and changing climates we're probably going to have to go back on rationing and full recycling, merrily skipping our way into a JG Ballard novel, only hopefully not one where we all also have a terrible midlife crisis, have a psychologist for a best friend and drive our cars through the barrier of a motorway overpass.

The future: a cross between Soylent Green and Burny P

We only got recycling bins this year + a wee box for putting glass in. But they've did it back to front, we need a wheely bin for our empties & a wee box for everything else

My faither has a compost bin*, so the entire family (that live in these parts anyway) send down their waste veg & stuff for him. He tried getting shot of cooked stuff & meat in a digester, but it just makes a foul smelling mouldy mess so he gave up on that idea.

*In fact, now that I think about it I'm fairly sure our cooncil were selling cheap compost bins to try & cut down on refuse a wee while back. Makes more sense than an extra collection.

Just because it's something you agree with doesn't mean it's not eroding civil liberties

I think it's a perfectly sensible idea to pay for what you use, as long as it's a revenue-neutral proposition.

True, but I honestly don't see what civil liberties it's meant to be eroding. The human right of having a flat fee for bin collection? What!? Explain-me-do.

And anyway, I don't necessarily agree with it - it's a shame that it's thought to be necessary. I just don't see what all the fuss is about.