Ooo look! I've just found £250m down the back of the sofa...

[Feltwell]

... say those nice men, Mr Cameron and Mr Pickles.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15118516

[Friday rant mode on]

What a load of, literally, rubbish. £250m from nowhere that couldn't be spent on anything better than a (not very) cheap vote-grabbing exercise??

We've lived with an alternate week scheme for 12 years now and it's fine. Our landfill bin is rarely more than 2/3 full, and that's for a family of five including a toddler in nappies. We're far from being fanatically green but we do use the recycling services provided by the council as much as possible.

To my mind the only ones with any kind of right to whinge are:-

- Those people where the local authority don't provide adequate recycling facilities - in which case weekly landfill collections are hardly the answer
- Those who have no outside space

Yes, the recycling containers are a bit of a pain as is washing up tins and yoghurt pots and the like, and I do groan on "bins night" when I have to sort the recycling out - but it only takes about 15 minutes every other week, hardly a big price to pay.

Anyone who has ever had the very dubious honour to visit a landfill site will testify to what foul places they are. Chucking rubbish in a hole in the ground is not exactly a long term answer. This seems like a licence for all those lazy sods who can't be bothered to recycle and just want to chuck everything in a bin, to do so even more. Grrrrr!

[Friday rant mode off/]

 

[Lime]

I agree, fortnightly collection works well.
We have 3 bins, one for landfill, the other 2 compost and recyle.
The fly population plummeted in our district when the first wheely bins were delivered.

I dislike washing out the tins though and would not dream of washing out plastic yoghurt pots.
It wastes water (needs to be hot water too) and detergent so I only wash out the "easy" tins.
I'm told that much of the plastic is not recyled.
The dirty tins go to landfill.
Why isn't there some form of magnetic collection?

We sort material as it is thrown away with 3 waste bins in the kitchen.

 

[JoceAndChris]

Oooh! I'm afraid I very strongly disagree with you Feltwell! We have a fortnightly collection and it's an absolute insult to modern standards of living. Foxes, rats, crows, and any other creature that feels in the mood pull my metal bins about and have a feast. I spend ages and ages clearing up, and it can be deeply embarrassing when my litter is pulled right across the public footpath, as it often is. We have spent a fortune on metal dustbins ( the council won't supply a wheelie bin lorry because apparently it's too delicate for our track, although Amazon deliver here no matter what). The bin bags take a long time to carry to the pick up point: an hour to put out the recycling ( around 6 back breaking sacks, up steps and through gates) and an hour and a half for the landfill, usually around 12 sacks, carried across several acres. When I'm old I can't see how I'll do it. I'm already thinking that maybe the right approach is the huge on site tip, although how people can look at such a thing on their premises I do not know.
Considering we're rare users of the NHS and don't have children, and considering we have to maintain a road the public drive up and down on because the Council refuse to, and considering how much of my free time I devote to gathering litter and furniture strewn across the 150 acre hill on which I live a weekly collection is the very least they could to for me. Grr.

 

[AMc]

We've had 2 week collections for the last 5 years we've been here with wheelie bins it is no problem.

We have the 3 bins - landfill, recycling and garden (which is paid seperately).
I also have a compost bin which I fill but have seldom used for it's output.
Only the garden bin is ever full and even then it's only a question of storing the trimmings next to it for a couple of collections when I've done the hedge.

I dislike washing out the tins though and would not dream of washing out plastic yoghurt pots.
It wastes water (needs to be hot water too) and detergent so I only wash out the "easy" tins.
I'm told that much of the plastic is not recyled.
The dirty tins go to landfill.
Why isn't there some form of magnetic collection?

I rinse yoghurt pots so they don't smell in the kitchen bin, but I've never found it arduous; they aren't recycled here unfortunately.
I don't know what constitutes a difficult tin but I tend to do this running off the cold water before the hot when I'm about to wash up.

My understanding is that lots of our recyclable waste is shipped to China in the empty ships that bring us our manufactured goods. I can see why it would be a health hazard to have containers filled with rotting food on ships for weeks on end.
I understand that as oil prices fluctuate the balance of the economics for plastic recycling shifts so some times it makes money and other times it loses money - why the waste can't be "banked" in storage until it is economic is beyond sensible explanation. Surely it's still worth paying to recycle this waste than to dump it in the ground?

I wish I could direct that much funding on a whim without any democratic oversight. If there is £250 million pounds a year going spare then there are any number of more pressing needs but I'm not attending the Conservative Party Conference so I doubt my opinion will be considered.

 

[Feltwell]

Fair point on the wheelie bins - they are a very worthwhile thing, putting out black bags is a right pain and they do get ripped open by animals, plus of course litter gets spread from those people that don't tie them properly. The amount of litter must have reduced dramatically with the introduction of wheelie bins - as well as being much safer and more pleasant for the bin crews, no danger of sharp objects puncturing the bags and injuring them, no liquid spills and no heavy lifting. I can see how bi-weekly collections without a wheelie bin wouldn't be much fun. But 12 bags though Joce? For 2 people, and lots of food scraps going to chickens? The 5 of us must generate no more than 4 bags worth at most every other week between us, and that's without poultry assistance!

Re. washing out tins and suchlike - even with a dishwasher, there are certain items such as wooden spoons and tin openers that need to be washed by hand. We wash those up and then use the manky water to wash the tins and yoghurt pots up. We do tend to give them a quick rinse first though, as they are used.

I also have a compost bin which I fill but have seldom used for it's output.

Yes - ours is a like a magic bin, no matter much you put in it never fills up despite never getting any compost out of it. The worms in there are the biggest and fattest I've ever seen! In fact, come think of it, some of them do look a bit like Eric Pickles.....

 

[JoceAndChris]

You lot are so lucky to have water to do recycling! Utterly dry here.
But I think at last I've found a partial solution that doesn't involve serious investment: one of the lovely tool hire men in Grantham is letting me have a 1100 l bowser for £50 for a week. It won't provide me with drinking water, but I'm hoping to be able to do a bit of tin-rinsing - I'll steal my water from here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Water_spout,_Croxton_Kerrial_-_geograph.org.uk_-_30072.jpg

I had a trial run yesterday with 21 old demi-johns and it was a wet, but fun experience.

I suppose I ought not to complain too much as unlike you lot I've not paid a penny on water rates in the last three years.

 

[LadyArowana]

Yes - ours is a like a magic bin, no matter much you put in it never fills up despite never getting any compost out of it. The worms in there are the biggest and fattest I've ever seen! In fact, come think of it, some of them do look a bit like Eric Pickles.....

:lol: I hope you don't have any Aussie friends, they will scoff at your puny Pommie earthworms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Gippsland_earthworm

 

[LadyArowana]

it was a wet, but fun experience.

:shock: Don't you have form for that? It sounds like a good plan though, hope it solves the problem until you can get the engineering done.

 

[Penners]

We have three wheelie bins. The council provides the black general waste bin and the blue recycle bin 'free' - they're emptied on alternate weeks. The general waste bin is rarely more than half full with 2 weeks' waste; the recycle bin is usually full .

The system works pretty satisfactorily, so long as I remember to put the bins out at the roadside on a Monday night. My only bugbear is that we aren't allowed to put glass in the recycle bin - we have to take that separately to the bottle dump. But it's a minor inconvenience, compared with (in my view) the major benefit of not having to sort the rest of our recycle stuff. It all just goes into the same bin.

We also have a green garden and food waste wheelie bin, for which we have to pay £30 a year. I don't object to that charge. It's emptied fortnightly on the same day as the recycle bin (but into different lorries - I've checked!).

What amazes me is the oft-reported situation with food waste. Apparently something like 30% of all our food in the UK is wasted - just chucked away. I have no idea who is doing all this food dumping (well - I have actually; I know the supermarkets waste a lot) but Mrs P wastes nothing. Open our fridge any day and you'll find little dishes containing 6 niblets of sweetcorn, half a sardine, a microscopic morsel of mashed potato... etc. She saves everything, and it usually ends up as a hearty soup, about once a week. The only things that get thrown away (onto the compost bin) are peelings, skins, leaves, tops and tails, and so on.

 

[Penners]

it was a wet, but fun experience.

:shock: Don't you have form for that?

In this context, does "form" refer to past behaviour or physical conformation?

 

[Feltwell]

You lot are so lucky to have water to do recycling! Utterly dry here.
But I think at last I've found a partial solution that doesn't involve serious investment: one of the lovely tool hire men in Grantham is letting me have a 1100 l bowser

I presume that's trailer mounted Joce? Do be careful:-

- Partially filled bowsers can be very unstable to tow if they don't have baffles inside. The water sloshes about and changes the centre of gravity as you go round bends.
- A full bowser can be very heavy. What are you towing it with?

They aren't always designed to be towed on the road, they are sometimes only intended for use off-road on building sites or farms, so may not be road legal.

I'm not saying don't do it, just check it out and be careful if you haven't already done so.

That water spout jobbie looks ideal, providing it's drinking water of course!

One more thought - have you considered getting yourself a small trailer with a ramp, and the Council giving you wheelie bins that you take in your trailer to the end of your track for collection?

 

[wobs]

Anyone who has ever had the very dubious honour to visit a landfill site will testify to what foul places they are. Chucking rubbish in a hole in the ground is not exactly a long term answer. This seems like a licence for all those lazy sods who can't be bothered to recycle and just want to chuck everything in a bin, to do so even more. Grrrrr!

[Friday rant mode off/]

I 've been to most of the landfills in my area (about 10 years ago), and yes they are unpleasent. What strikes you is the utter wastefullness of society. The items that are there often seem in decent condition, and yet chucked into a hole in the ground. The amount of recycleable material that the UK has landfilled is staggering.

To be fair, many sites are well managed these days, with large scale civil engineering and management going into them.

To be fair though, it should not be suprising that the UK is in the state it is in, given that we had decades of cheap landfill rates. No one looks to the UK as a model of how to deal with waste, but with landfill tax rising year on year, we should be getting better:
Landfill Tax per tonne in the UK
1996 £7.00
1997 £8.00
1998 £9.00
1999 £10.00
2000 £11.00
2001 £12.00
2002 £13.00
2003 £14.00
2004 £15.00
2005 £18.00
2006 £21.00
2007 £24.00
2008 £32.00
2009 £40.00
2010 £48.00
2011 £56.00
2012 £64.00
2013 £72.00
2014 £80.00

....it makes it more worthwhile to think about waste as a resource. Something many other countries do as a routine.

It is an aritcle of faith that the plastics one puts in the recycle bin is actually recycled, but with the rising tax, it becomes more likely. The challenge though is that different plastics have different values, and uses, and seperation is always going to be tricky without state of the art technology (you can do this for different plastics) or sending it for some poor soul to sort manually. There are manual sorting plants springing up, and this reflexs the increased likelyhood that our waste is not landfilled. But again, it is an article of faith what happens to this.

I hope to be visiting some of these this year.

As for bins:
We have a black general waste bin that we could go for 2 months without filling it in theory (even with a very cute 6month old), a blue recycleables bin (metals, plastic containers, paper, card, bags of cloths), and a green food waste bin.

We don't have a garden waste bin as we have no garden.

Hull still needs an incinerator though, contruary to what many say. There is so much potential energy still being chucked into holes, it is a scandal.

 

[JoceAndChris]

@wobs Interesting post, I agree it's a shocking thing that so much just goes to waste. I'd love it if we could return to cheese sliced at the counter and wrapped in waxed paper, reusing your paper bags and selecting your vegetables, etc. But I can't see that happening anytime soon.

The main bulk of my landfill is stuff that will become soil - basically 90% dust-extracted wood shavings and 10% chicken droppings - it doesn't compost quickly and it only burns if it's very very dry. I don't like to dump it on the premises as that's a real no-no for bio security. This summer we've had to battle Cocci, Mareks,red mite and 'flu so the amount of wasted bedding has been terrible. I hate filling up the landfill but disease is wiping out my bantams so I've had to throw scruples to the wind and just sweep and sweep and sweep to attempt to contain it. Maybe I should try to set fire to it a bit more than I do.

@Feltwell No, I hadn't considered a trailer. It's a very good idea. Currently, it's awkward to get wheeled things through the garden as the path is stepped but I'm thinking of redesigning that so that it's sloped instead.
That could really help for when we get doddery - thanks F!

The bowser is all a bit of an experiment but for £50 it's worth a try. Apparently they have a tail-board and lights and for the main journey ( Lincoln to Grantham) it will be empty. The fill will be done at night as I'm expecting that road to be pretty quiet then. It might be best just to put 500 l in the first run, just to see what it's like to tow. Chris will be towing it - not me - we have a 4 wheel drive Suzuki Vitara and I hope it's up to the job!

No, that water gushing out isn't for drinking but it will give me a toilet and a shower at long last, enable dish washing rather than eating out of packets and I can do hand clothes-washing.

We'll have to stay drinking wine.

Thanks for the word of caution.

 

[Penners]

It might be best just to put 500 l in the first run, just to see what it's like to tow.

The problem is that you have a double-edged sword here, Joce. As Feltwell said above, if the bowser isn't full the water can slosh around, making it unstable and unpredictable. From that point-of-view you'll actually be better off towing it brim full. In that state, however, it will of course be a great deal heavier. 1100 litres of water will weigh 1100 kg - plus, of course, the weight of the bowser itself.

I don't know whether yours is a Vitara or a Grand Vitara, but in the absence of more specific information on towing weights it's usual to work to the following rule-of-thumb:-

If the trailer has its own brakes, the maximum towed weight should be 85% of the weight of the towing vehicle.

If the trailer is unbraked, the figure should be reduced to 50% of the weight of the towing vehicle.

And just to reiterate - the towed weight is the weight of the trailer plus its load.

 

[vicky whitworth]

I have much sympathy with Jose and her rubbish, although how you fill 12 black sacks in a fortnight Jose beats me. We aim to fill two. Bottles, tins and newspaper go for recycling weekly, and the rest goes fortnightly. The Council say they offer a kerbside collection provided you put your rubbish onto the highway or footpath. They won't collect ours though from our kerbside as they say they can't get down the lane - why they can't walk down like the rest of us have to is beyond me. But that means we have to carry the rubbish to the top of the lane, 200 yards steeply uphill. We can't get a wheely bin up so we have an enormous thing called a gull sack, provided by the Council, it's supposed to keep the gulls and the foxes out. Like Jose my rubbish is often scattered down the street but since it's not outside my house I just pretend it isn't mind and express horror at what people put out for rubbish!

 

[Feltwell]

If the trailer is unbraked then it's illegal to use the bowser on the road if it's filled. 750kg gross weight is the upper limit for an unbraked trailer. You can tell easily if it's braked - the coupling head will likely have a concertina rubber bit between it and trailer so it can move back and forth when you brake, it will have brake cables underneath the trailer that go to the wheel hubs, and it will probably have a handbrake lever near the coupling.

If the coupling head is just bolted directly to the chassis of the trailer with no way of moving then it's unbraked. Many bowsers are like this because they are intended for site use only, don't presume that if yours has lights that it's legal to tow when filled - they may there just so the empty bowser can be towed to the site.

The car's handbook will tell you the "kerb weight" of the car, and if it's a braked trailer then as Penners says 85% is the recommended upper limit, 100% is the maximum upper limit but it's not recommended to go above 85% unless you're experienced in towing trailers. If the car's handbook states a "maximum towing weight" then ignore it - it will usually be above the car's own weight and is not safe. Why they quote that I've no idea, it's just not safe to tow above 100%, the trailer will have control over the car! Loads of stuff on t'internet about towing weights and recommendations for all those caravaning types.

Quick search tells me that if you've got an ordinary Vitara then a 1994 1.6 Vitara weighs 1195kg, which sounds about right - check for your year and engine size though. This makes 1016kg at the 85% rule for maximum trailer weight. With the bowsers own self-weight then you shouldn't tow it when it's filled - half full would probably be OK.

Commercial tankers for carrying fuel and suchlike have baffles inside the tank, to stop the liquid sloshing about as much. Look inside the bowser to see if it's got these. If it hasn't then tow it slowly when it's got water in it, especially on bends - it will be quite unstable and if you manage to roll it, it could pull the car over with it. Sounds a bit over-dramatic but I've seen it done on a construction site, someone managed to overturn an Escort van towing a water bowser because they took a corner too quickly.

 

[Flyfisher]

I can understand Joce's particular rubbish collection (and water) difficulties but, to be fair, they can't be very typical. We've had alternating rubbish and recycling collections for years and have never found it particularly onerous - except, as Penners mentioned, those times when I've forgotten the collection day and thus have to live with the relevant wheely bin for four weeks instead of two.

So I basically agree with Feltwell that this £250m could probably be better spent elsewhere and does rather seem like pandering to the popular vote, though that's what government's do best I suppose. Still, nothing like a nice neat row of deckchairs from which to watch the ship go down. :wink:

As an aside, our recycle bin (no glass allowed) is black and the rubbish bin is green. NFN perhaps?

 

[JoceAndChris]

Thanks for all the concerned posts regarding my forthcoming towing adventure. I'm very put off now! It's a little Vitara and they have a reputation for rolling! Perhaps I'm better off waiting for Dad to get back from his holiday, he has a big Pajero and spends half the year towing a heavy caravan round the mountains of Spain and France.
I see the company does this one:
http://www.hirestation.co.uk/product.php?productid=1002
which might be better.
I'll phone the Manager before we set off to collect, I didn't actually get to speak to him today so couldn't get much information on it really. Chris certainly won't want to do illegal towing and has made me spend today sorting the car out with all working lights and oil etc and getting a number plate for the trailer - so boring!

Vicky - as to how I fill 6 landfill sacks a week - when your chickens have multiplied to 27 you'll understand! That, plus at least 2 a fortnight still clearing the previous owner's rubbish. And maybe another sack a week of the previous previous owner's motorbike dissections. Not to mention the 19thC pots, bits of glass and rusting agricultural mysteries. Basically, the whole place has been a weedy rubbish dump for a very long time. Not any more!

 

[Flyfisher]

I agree with all the comments about legal trailer weights. It's fairly complicated these days and easy to end up with an illegal load.
An easy mistake to make is with the maximum tow-hitch loading, especially when towing a trailer with a variable-position load, e.g. a car-trailer with a tractor positioned too far forward.

Joce, it's a shame that you'd have to drive so far to fill the bowser. Is it possible to find a near-neighbour (perhaps not on a meter) who would allow you to fill the bowser from their supply? You could then drive home very slowly with a full bowser, which would pretty much eliminate the 'sloshing risk', and only have to risk a few hundred yards on the road with an overweight trailer.

 

[philpjuk100]

Seems a lot to hire a bowser,see ebay Item number: 120780587704, phil.