GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post

Jake · 10-11-2010, 10:31 PM posted to uk.rec.gardening

On Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:21 +0000 (GMT),
(Steve Harris) wrote:

Cheltenham Borough Council is fed up with collecting garden refuse in
reusable green bags free of charge. Instead, they are offering to rent us
bins - a snip at £36/year. snipped

Lucky you. Round here (a council in South Wales somewhere between the
Vale of Glamorgan and Neath Port Talbot) makes it quite clear that if
we put the slightest bit of garden waste out they will descend like
the proverbial ton of bricks. All garden waste has to be taken to the
local public amenity site (tip) as council refuse processing
operatives (bin men) have instructions to leave it behind. Someone
told me that we could buy single-use disposal containers (special
bags) at about £8 a time and put garden waste in it but someone bought
a few bags, filled them and put them out. They got ripped so he put
them into other bags and the operatives left them behind. Someone else
said their special bags went into the refuse lorry with normal waste.

The local Council say on their website that one of the greatest
problems with bags of refuse is that they get ripped open overnight by
cats. So we must minimise the problem by not putting out the bags
until 7pm on the night before collection. This is presumably because
most cats, being under 15, are not allowed out late at night (orthe
RSPCA will prosecute the owners for putting their moggies at risk of
catnapping by vivisectionists). We used to have green wheelie bins but
they were obviously considered retrograde (because the cats couldn't
get in).We are now allowed to use wheelie bins only to store the black
plastic bags until 7 pm on the day prior to collection when we remove
aforementioned bags from wheelie bins and put them on the pavement to
be ripped open by cats etc.

I have devoted as much space as I can in the garden to garden waste
recovery facilities (compost heaps) but I still have to take a couple
of boot loads of former bedding/container plants to the tip for
recycling each autumn. Such is life.

Round here, people get fined £100 for dropping a fag end in the
street. But if the recycling chap drops a bottle and leaves a lump of
glass in the roadway big enough to rip a tyre to pieces, that's
acceptable.

BTW, whenever I buy compost I make sure that it is NOT sourced from
local authority amenity sites. I don't want to buy someone else's
Japanese Knotweed roots thanks very much.

Forking out £36 a year would sort of be a waste given that it's only
over a few weeks each autumn that I run out of composting space. But
measured against the local £8 a bag, say 6-8 bags a bootload, 2ish
bootloads each autumn, it probably makes economic sense.