Bin collections

I was once again struck this morning by the thought of councils fining people who put their bins out too early. Today is the weekly recycling day, which means the stupid boxes with the stupid lids* get put out.

Now the bins are kept at the back of the house and I bring them through the garage to put at the front, due to the width of the garage this is only really feasible when the car's not in the way. So if I'm not planning to go out the night before the collection this means taking them out when I get home or when I leave in the morning. As I have space on the drive I usually leave them out at night and drop them next to the pavement in the morning either way.

Regardless of whether it's the weekly recycling or fortnightly normal collection the collection wagon normally drives down the opposite side of the street of a morning before turning around and heading back up mine. This means collection normally occurs after 2pm. Now that means in theory I could leave my bins on my drive until I head home for lunch and put them out then. Excellent just what the council welcomes as I'm obstructing things for the shortest period of time.

Well no because on occasion I've got back to find the bins have already been emptied and this morning they decided to take a different route and they were emptied at 8.15 this morning and fortunately I'd already been out to add some extra to them and moved them down at the same time.

So what the council seem to expect is people to put out the bins at the times they specify and only those times and to move them away when collected. This may seem reasonable and they can complain that people are too lazy to get up in the morning to do it, but this is how people are being conditioned to behave. Running down to make sure your bin is placed by 8am only to watch it being collected at 3pm is pretty much guaranteed to make people wonder why they bothered. Combine that with putting it out later and not having it collected because they came 'early' and you know what? I'll just stick it out at night and sleep in.

* They've provided lids to keep the water out of the boxes when it rains except the lids are concave with a ridge around the edge where they fit the boxes, in other words cheap plastic moulding. So yep they'll keep the rain out of the boxes while at the same time forming a centimetre deep puddle on the top that results in a dirty great splash of water if you try to move either the box or the lid - excellent design there folks.