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

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.

"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.