council check recycle bin 5am grrr

Way more than 'a bit too far'! I am English but I live in Italy. However for the last six months I have been back to UK for a week every month and am fully aware of how recycling is done there. It's crazy and they expect too much of people. My mother is 92 and lived alone until she moved into a care home some months ago. As you can imagine she made hardly any garbage at all and indeed could have managed with one bin for everything. Instead she had three bins and was almost insane doing her best to seperate things as best she could so that she was not fined by the council. She even had to trundle her bins out each week at her age as they would not collect if they were not placed outside on the pavement After complaining we did manage to get them to provide her with just one bin and to come inside her gate to collect it. In the same way that she had her bins removed because she was not creating enough waste, I feel that you, because of a larger than normal family, should be provided with extra bins at no extra cost. As you also say, paying someone to check what is inside the bins is bordering on absurd We recycle in Italy too but without the hassle that there is in UK. We are provided with bags not bins - yellow for plastic, white for food waste, etc and then we take these outside to communal bins which are emptied almost daily. A different garbage truck comes and empties each one. This means that our garbage is off the premises and our homes and/or gardens.

The local council worker checking your recycling bin at 5am was very weird indeed. I am so surprised that they had to check people's bins and at that early hour it was designed to be in secret. I think the council are going way too far. I was so fed up that my local council left rubbish and recycling for more than 4 to 6 weeks due to snow this winter. It made our streets messy this Christmas and New Year. I used to live in a county where they gave transparent plastic bags for the recycling. So I used as many as I needed. I could have one for newspapers, one for tins and one for plastic. Where I live now I have a green hard plastic recycling box. In it I only have a limited amount of space. Things in it are mixed together. The worst thing is it doesn't have a lid. Every week the council are meant to come for recycling and they are meant to come every fortnight for the rubbish. They are trying to increase the recycling and limit the rubbish for landfill.