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. Or we can drive to the tip. They just don't get
this environment lark do they?

Their announcement "Improvements to household waste and recycling
services" (I kid you not) can be found he

http://www.cheltenham.gov.uk/site/sc...php?newsID=613

Steve Harris - Cheltenham - To get my real address, remove one fruit

"Bob Hobden" wrote in message
...
Our Council (Runnymede Borough Council) have always charged for the
rent/use of green reusable sacks for garden waste which they then collect
every two weeks.
The alternative is you cart it to the Council Recycling Site in your car.
If you try it in a van, I have a Landrover 90 hardtop just for such
things, you have to have a Surrey County Council Waste Licence.



Our garden (Brown) waste bin's contents are collected two-weekly, no
charge.
I doubt if the collected contents value warrants the cost of the fuel etc.
to make it viable.

Regards
Pete
www.thecanalshop.com

On 10/11/2010 19:00, Bob Hobden wrote:

The alternative is you cart it to the Council Recycling Site in your
car. If you try it in a van, I have a Landrover 90 hardtop just for such
things, you have to have a Surrey County Council Waste Licence.


My father asked me to take some of his rubbish to the recycling site on
my last visit to England in my French registered van, but they wouldn't
accept a van, so it resulted in a big bonfire on his yard instead.

--
David in Normandy.
To e-mail you must include the password FROG on the
subject line, or it will be automatically deleted
by a filter and not reach my inbox.

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.

On 10/11/2010 18:46, Pete wrote:


"Bob Hobden" wrote in message
...
Our Council (Runnymede Borough Council) have always charged for the
rent/use of green reusable sacks for garden waste which they then
collect every two weeks.
The alternative is you cart it to the Council Recycling Site in your
car. If you try it in a van, I have a Landrover 90 hardtop just for
such things, you have to have a Surrey County Council Waste Licence.

Our garden (Brown) waste bin's contents are collected two-weekly, no
charge.
I doubt if the collected contents value warrants the cost of the fuel
etc. to make it viable.

They don't but avoiding the landfill tax by recycling it tips the
balance in favour of separate collection. My local council does a pretty
good job collecting green waste in green bins alternate weeks through
spring, summer and autumn at no charge. Kerbside collections are free to
residents. The glass, plastic and cans collection is hilarious with one
blue box per household of *mixed* recyclables. The guys spend ages
sorting into three hoppers on the truck and a Heath Robinson arrangement
of levers flings it in when the hoppers are full.

I have lost count of the number of full sized wheelie bins that
Salfordians have these days but I think pink, brown, black and blue.

In Belgium only waste placed in the offical tax prepaid bags will be
collected (this applies both to domestic refuse and recyclables). And
woe betide you if you put something in the wrong bag - somehow it will
be returned to you with a nasty red sticker on it!

Regards,
Martin Brown

"David in Normandy" wrote in message
. fr...
On 10/11/2010 19:00, Bob Hobden wrote:

The alternative is you cart it to the Council Recycling Site in your
car. If you try it in a van, I have a Landrover 90 hardtop just for such
things, you have to have a Surrey County Council Waste Licence.


My father asked me to take some of his rubbish to the recycling site on my
last visit to England in my French registered van, but they wouldn't
accept a van, so it resulted in a big bonfire on his yard instead.


Many CCs have restrictive regs now, which like all "environmental" laws, are
causing the environment more harm than the good they are in theory trying to
achieve. At county hall, paperwork is reality, and our reality is just an
inconvenience. Common sense of course, is not in their vocabulary.

One of my neighbours took a mattress and nothing else to the local recycling
site. They wouldn't let him in with it because it was in a pick-up truck.
"It's trade waste, that is" he was told. " No, it's a mattress from my
daughter's bedroom" says he. A long discussion/argument ensued, with the
predictable "rules is rules" having the final say. So he brought it back to
the estate and dumped it on a grass verge. The council then sent two men in
a pick-up truck to collect it and take it to the council depot which is 5
miles further away than the site it was rejected from. Doubtless this
entailed loads of form-filling in the process, thus protecting the
environment.

Steve

"Steve Harris" wrote in message
...
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. Or we can drive to the tip. They just don't get
this environment lark do they?



It has been a chargeable service round here for a while (Broadland District
Council). It works out about £1.50/ bin over the year. Good value I would
say if you compare it with commercial waste disposals eg., skips and bag
collection. Buy a cup of tea out and see how much change you get from
£1.50. I had to go on a waiting list for a few weeks when I first applied
for a brown bin.

mark

"mark" wrote in message
o.uk...

"Steve Harris" wrote in message
...
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. Or we can drive to the tip. They just don't
get
this environment lark do they?



It has been a chargeable service round here for a while (Broadland
District Council). It works out about £1.50/ bin over the year. Good value
I would say if you compare it with commercial waste disposals eg., skips
and bag collection. Buy a cup of tea out and see how much change you get
from £1.50. I had to go on a waiting list for a few weeks when I first
applied for a brown bin.

mark

We have to have a brown bin here that costs 26/year to get rid of weeds and
such. Luckily I have a big compost heap.
If we dare to put any garden waste in our black wheelie bin it will not be
taken as the wheelie bin police look inside.
T

Just think yourself lucky. The road outside our house has nowhere for wheelie bin vans to stop. The Council will pick up black bags for non-recyclables, but it doesn't do a bag collection for recyclables or garden waste. So we have to take everything - cardboard, plastics, bottles, paper, garden waste that I don't want to compost - round to the recycling centre ourselves.