please empty your brain below

In Wandsworth most residents don't have a bin but just put the bags out, which seems to work well in its tightly built streets where pavement and front garden space for bins is very limited. I found to my surprise that the rubbish collectors will happily collect from bin cupboards.
Here in Ireland, refuse collection is privatised. So different houses along the street will have different bins collected on different days. My provider provides two giant wheelie bins - one for general waste (for which I am allowed an annual weight limit) and one for anything remotely recyclable - a much wider variety than I could recycle in the UK.
Our house in Tower Hamlets gets visits from three separate collecting teams and their vehicles each week. One collects garden and food waste for composting, it all gets mixed in the same dustcart and we have reusable bags for the garden waste and little brown bins for the food. The other two dustcarts collect recyclables and non-recyclables for which we have pink sacks from the council and black bags that we buy ourselves. This is different for householders not on a shared development. Few households seem to bother with food recycling and effective segregation of other recyclables is also lax.
Croydon, Kingston, Merton and Sutton are all part of the South London Waste Partnership. Some bins in those boroughs have all four logos on. I am unclear on how the above works, on a practical level.
The methods and rules around recycling vary so much from place to place that it confuses many people, myself included. I fear that most of it as a result simply goes to landfill anyway.
And out here in the Thames Valley we have waste bin (three weekly), recycling bin (fortnightly) and food box (weekly). And a complicated card telling us which bins to put out on this 1/2/3 week cycle.
From 2023 the Government wants to impose mandatory but free green waste collections with the aim of increasing the recycling rate by 6%.

I have known about this for some time however there was a confusing article in the press yesterday where local Councils are against it but the reasons didn't make sense.
In (just outside London) Thurrock, there are 3 bins. Grey (or green) non-recyclables, blue recyclables including glass and brown for garden & kitchen. All were weekly collection but the brown slipped to fortnightly after stopping at the heart of lockdown.
Barnet did use to recycle food waste and then they suddenly stopped, which is a shame but it was also never a pleasant bin to deal with by the end of the week.
In my home town in the South East, I became fed up of the red card/paper sack becoming dirty and deterioating in the sunlight, blowing away, and having no-where convenient to keep it. I ordered a red lidded wheelie bin at £50+; this works much better (at least after the council replaced the leaking cracked lid which broke the first time the bin was tipped into the bin lorry, this only took six plus months).
Although Bromley technically requires a box for paper recycling and a box for plastic/glass/tins, in practice they’re perfectly happy for you to use the same box for both as long as you separate them correctly. They’re not going to refuse to pick up the box just because it’s the wrong colour!

This is obviously convenient when you have too much to fit in one box as otherwise you’d need even more boxes (e.g. two of each colour)
Redbridge used to provide residents with heavy-duty re-usable nylon bags for garden waste. The bags are no longer available, although plenty are still seen in the borough's gardens. Residents are now expected to put their garden waste into their own flimsy black plastic sacks (which then tear and split). Garden waste is not collected year-round in Redbridge, only from a date in spring through to a date in autumn.
I’ve recently moved borough - although it’s only to an adjacent one. Going from wheelie bins to no bins (except for garden waste) is a huge backwards step.

We’ve actually had to purchase a wheelie bin to store the full bags in, rather than keeping bags of waste in the house or garden which would probably encourage vermin.

On bin day, we’re often both out of the house by 4.30am so we have to take the bags out of the wheelie bin and put them on the edge of our front garden very early. This can still lead to inquisitive deer and foxes tearing the bags looking for food scraps. If we leave them in the bin, they won’t be collected.

Hopefully, the council will see sense soon.
Crazy, and not so much better here in Australia. The standard is general rubbish, recycling and green waste but there is bin colour consistency. It was announced today there will be a fourth bin, for glass only. There will also be consistency of colours.

It must be a very difficult and expensive project as it is not expected to be completed until 2027. I can only roll my eyes.
Three Rivers collects recycling from a grey bin with a green lid and a brown food caddy every week. Rubbish goes in a smaller green bin plus garden waste in a brown bin (which you pay for) on alternate weeks. Garden Waste is suspended over the Xmas/New Year period.
In the City of London collection is daily Monday to Friday, with no bins (but special plastic sacks for waste and for recycling). There is a small food waste caddy system too, but I don't use that so I'm not sure how that works.
The bins are about the only way you can identify the boundary between Richmond and Kingston.
There are even three culs de sac in Kingston whose only road access is through Richmond, meaning lengthy detours through Richmond for the bin lorries to reach them.
Here in Newham the council is planning to switch at some point in November to a different recycling system. Pleasingly we will be allowed to recycle more stuff - it is very limited currently. At the moment we are told to place glass in the general waste bin and are assured that they have a way of recycling it from there. I don't know if this is going to change but it will certainly cause confusion if it does. Newham are also planning to move over to weekly collections for recycling and, as a result, are advertising for 8 HGV drivers to make this possible. Securing those will be easy, I'm sure...
Tower Hamlets claim that their food recycling bins are fox proof. They are not. Sadly I've given up using the food recycling service because the foxes know exactly how to open the bins, scatter the contents, and drag the mess everywhere.
Wandsworth is currently experimenting with free food waste collection in the Southfields area. There is also a much smaller trial to encourage composting in your own home. A previous trial gave many residents free composting bins.

I like the fact Wandsworth doesn't demand a certain sort of bin. I've lived somewhere where the contract changed and the new provider demanded all existing wheelie bins were replaced with new wheelie bins even though bothy types fitted the dust carts. Total waste of money and resources.
Recycle Now has an excellent website which tells you what you can put in each bag/box.

I've used it plenty of times to work out what to do with light bulbs, etc
Councils shouldn't be using plastic bags for their collections in the current climate crisis.

I'm glad my borough doesn't make us separate the recycling out - what happens if you have a glass jar with a paper label, for example?!

Plastic bags and film still seems to be the worst though. Even our local supermarkets no longer have bag recycling bins now we've supposedly gone bag-free. Instead, lockdown seems to have drastically increased the amount that now enters my household!
I appreciate that your investigation does not explain the full picture, or was not targeted to show the huge indifferences between Counties, Cities and even boroughs within the same city in the UK, your investigation provides a nice visual of the indifferences across the UK as to what can and cannot be recycled dpending on where you live.

As a nation we should have one common system which everyone can buy into if we wish to become a 'greener' society.
Even though French companies empty plenty of Britain's bins we don't go as far as the French in terms of recycling.

This booklet is typical of local recycling there. Even details of where to put your oyster shells.
Fascinating. No wonder people struggle to get their refuse and recycling right!
A vuluable summary of the situation. Down here, far from the pernicious influence of London, we have the usual two bins for recycling and non-recycling, plus two foodwaste bins - one to use in the kitchen, and one to be put outside on the day of collection...
Think I read somewhere that some councils want to go to a every-THREE week collection cycle. Madness.

I already have to take time to make personal trips to my local til/recycling depot because it’s so complicated in my - name of Borough - that I often get it wrong.

And in some places woe betide if the green lid is not flat. Don’t leave it sticking up! because they won’t collect it. Aaagh!

Looking forward to the ‘what councils collect Christmas trees’ blog in the first week of January.
I don't know if the bin men are well remunerated or not (most likely not) but I am a big fan of wandsworth's collections. Same day every week no matter what, they take anything and everything, from out of whatever weird thing you happen to put your sacks in. I've had them collect stuff I was planning to pay extra for a bulky collection---but instead walked out one morning to see a bin man heaving my old barbecue into the truck.
Bin collections - the fourth pillar of Englishness, right up there with the Monarchy, NHS, and BBC - a shared (love it or hate it) experience that moulds the national character.
Currently itching because our food waste collections are suspended due to a lack of drivers.. I have a SYSTEM goddammit!
Multiple bins is a weird setup. Streets with gardens full of ugly, bulky bins do not look good and it slows down the time it takes to collect.

I've bored on about this before but in Brussels houses have a single 'container' of some type in the garden/basement where we store everything, separated into one of 5 different bags. Then the bags go out onto the street before pickup. The bin men whizz by in no time (twice a week).
We live in Barnet and have 3 bins: the green one is for garden waste. We now have to pay for this to be collected - it used to be a free service. Barnet has tried various approaches to recycling over the years. Food waste collection was a fairly brief experiment which the foxes miss. We also used to put paper, glass, cardboard etc in a black recycling box. That was replaced by a blue recycling bin. We recycled the old box by using it to store plant pots in the shed.
Havering residents have the fourth highest London council tax (based on propertydata.co.uk/council-tax so might question their relatively poor refuse provision.
Enfield here. We have three bins - recycling, rubbish, and a food mini bin. After collection day for either (all different schedules), the bins are scattered all over the pavement, never wheeled back to where they were collected. I get that the bin collectors are on a deadline, but wish the council factored in time for bins to be returned neatly to the homes. It's sad to see how services get eroded.
Four bins" Forgot the garden waste one. Basically our narrow front garden is a bin portal.
In South Cambs we are provided with 3 wheelie bins:
- green for garden and food waste
- blue for recycling
- black for anything else

Black is collected one fortnight, green and blue the other, but green becomes monthly in the winter. We can have a second green bin, but would be charged if we put both out.

Mildly jealous of those with purple bins.
I know that Richmond and Wandsworth have some joint services. It doesn't look like combined refuse collections would be a good match.
Here in York we have separate bins for glass, paper and plastic. However, they are all mixed together in the collecting lorry.
This could be the first time Boris has been caught telling the truth - ‘recycling’ is a waste of time.
Islington's bins don't need to be capacious. There's very little should be going in them once you've separated out recycling and food waste.
Here in Hong Kong there is a communal bin on each floor of our block so no need to take rubbish 'out'. We do also have recycling bins for paper, plastic and metals but sadly recycling is not the norm here and there is huge amount of unnecessary packaging. The government is planning to introduce a waste-charging scheme with special bags people will have to buy for their rubbish.
This post reminded me of Newham's huge investment, around a decade ago, in a facility which recognised its orange recycling bags and automatically sorted them from general rubbish. I think the idea was to minimise the number of different bins. Unfortunately, the colour was a little too similar to the colour of bags given out by a popular supermarket. The machines couldn't tell the difference and household rubbish ended up in with the recyclables.
With regards to food waste recycling I remember having a slop bin to go to pig food in my school hall at lunchtime, late 70s early 80s.
Three Rivers food waste is taken to the South Herts Bio-digester at M25 J22: they produce methane, burnt for electricity (very green). But I do wonder how much diesel is used in the separate food trucks and whether that would be more efficiently converted straight to electricity.
Excellent info. Could you add to your table in a future post:
1 Each borough's recycling rates.
2 Which waste disposal authority takes each boroughs waste. Wandsworth/Lambeth/K&C/Hammersmith go to Western Riverside Waste Authority at Smugglers Way.

In Wandsworth, if you don't use a bin, the foxes have a field day. So:
3 Respective fox populations for each borough.
A post on Friday will be perfectly acceptable.
You wonder what could be if this was a more "joined up" system - here in Greater Manchester all* the boroughs are signed up to one combined authority for bin collection.

And we still have different colours, numbers, patterns, and lists of what's allowed in each bin between the boroughs - what I put in here in Rochdale is different to the people down the road in Oldham, and again for Tameside, and yet again for Salford, and so on.

(*Except for Wigan for some reason; possibly pies require specialist additional recycling facilities?)
Your nbs have made me curious how many actual homes there are in the city of London and how they vary, eg cheapest and most expensive.
Roger B, are you sure the York lorries do not have separate compartments for glass, paper and plastic. Some councils operate them, though that doesn't stop the locals complaining that everything is mixed together.
With so many different systems across all the London boroughs, it's not surprising that people renting and moving from place to place find it so hard to get the hang of things and then get a reputation for being 'anti-social' when they don't get it right.
JohnC - yes I'm afraid so! I had assumed there would be separate compartments until the day we watched while the bins were emptied, all into the back of the same lorry. I even double checked with the driver as I wasn't sure I believed my eyes. The driver claimed it would all be sorted at the depot.
You've just reminded me, it's time to put the bins out! Greenwich Council, three bins all collected weekly.
You do seem to have hit on a topic to raise your comment count.
I live in a block of flats in H&F so it's different from the system you describe.

We have heavy duty orange recycling bags (free from the council) which you empty yourself into a "smart bin" outside the building and then there are paladin bins for non-recyclable waste. Both sets of bins are emptied every week and we pay for the rental of the paladin bins (our block of 82 dwellings pays about £1800 per year).
Do Brent now require you to seperate recycling into bin and box? Lived there for 3 years and never seperated anything. Though in one part of the borough, if the bin was not moved precisely close enough to the gate, and if the lid of the bin was ever so slightly up, they would not collect it. Putting it on the footpath would attract a fine. Yet, I now live in Camden where we *must* put them on the footpath the night before.










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