Tales of the Village - Bin Wars!
By Boingboing
@boiboing (13153)
Northampton, England
July 19, 2018 11:53am CST
Today on the village Facebook page people are up in arms about the rubbish collection - AGAIN! It's been a long hot summer and we've not seen rain for nearly 2 months. Sure, it's fair to say that this is brilliant weather for making stuff rot and go nasty but people are getting very excited that there are maggots in their main bins, the ones that are only collected every THREE weeks.
If you feel the need to check the 'back-story' on this you can find it here:
Anyway, back to the bins. One lady is saying she FREEZES her food waste and then put it out in the bin on collection day but she says she's getting maggots from her fruit and veg peelings which she doesn't freeze.
It is disgusting - I completely agree - but food waste of all kinds should be going in the smaller 'brown' bin that gets collected every week. Fruit and veg peelings as well as her nasty bits of old meat can all go in that bin or the veg waste can go into the garden waste bin (collected every 2 weeks) or she can get a cheap subsidised compost bin for just £10 including delivery.
Change always takes time to adapt to but with a bin for food waste, another for packaging and another for garden waste, I'm not even sure what's left to go in the 3-weekly collected bin. Ours is half full even after 3 weeks.
We haven't yet got to the stage when people sneak around at night putting their rubbish in other people's bins but I predict it won't be long until that happens.
As one man said today on the Facebook page "We used to get by with one small bin and now we have 4 big ones so how is it possible that people just can't manage?"
Life is unquestionably more complicated than it used to be and we generate more rubbish than ever before but I rather like that our new system forces us to think about it a lot more than before.
Our district council recently had to introduce a new system for rubbish collection. The old system had been a benchmark for excellence when it was first...
5 people like this
4 responses
@Mike197602 (15487)
• United Kingdom
19 Jul 18
Gap in the market for vacuum bins.
If flies can't get at the rubbish they can't lay eggs...we just need better fitting bin lids
1 person likes this
@Mike197602 (15487)
• United Kingdom
19 Jul 18
I think the future is in community fuel production where everyone deposits biodegradable waste in a central place and it is converted to gas.
Tech does exist to do this but it's expensive to set up.
Sort of like a community investing in wind power...it does work but costs a lot.
@boiboing (13153)
• Northampton, England
19 Jul 18
@Mike197602 Oh boy, I could have written a dozen 'tales of the village' about the wind mills in the valley and the attempts to stop the local high-tech racing car engine research centre putting up one on their site.
1 person likes this
@Freelanzer (10744)
• Canada
19 Jul 18
Having a compost bin will reduce a lot of the headaches over maggots, etc. We only have two bins one for garbage and one for recyclables picked up weekly. Yard waste like grass and clippings are picked up every two weeks.
