TheOldFellow
wibbled on Friday 13 November 2009 18:36

On Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:42:42 +0000
Tim W wrote:

Ah - the joys of crap councils...

Commiserations. I have to say that Allerdale (Cumbria) where I live
are absolutely fabulous about bins. (They have their crap points too of
course.)

To be fair, Rother have very helpful Council Tax dept (despite the fact they
want too much money for too little service!) and the BCO is really nice.
Tunbridge Wells have fairly good refuse services but are crapheads in
*many* other respects, especially with respect to slapping car parking
charges everywhere and anytime.

Three Bins:

Big Green one for Compostable Garden stuff. I put small trees in it.
Small Green one for any paper or card. SWMBO has a Fairtade stall at
church, lotsa cardboard.
Small Black one for Landfill stuff.

Collection: black every week, green bins alternate.

They also run the most fantastic modern recycling centre I have ever
seen at Flusco, near Penrith. With helpful friendly staff who fall over
themselves to help you get it right, and muscle things out of the car.
If you are in the Lakes on holiday, it's almost worth a visit!

Our local dump has the most helpful staff in the world, for a tiny site.
It's only the household pickup service that's ****e. At least they also
intercept and re-sell small furniture and interesting niknaks, which T
Wells never did. They have quite a side stall of interesting stuff.

We find it hard (two people) to put more than one swing-bin liner in the
black bin - mostly it's over-packaged food containers that can't be
cleaned for recycling (and dead CLS bulbs - no only kidding). We do
collect all the cans, glass and plastics to take to Flusco when we are
passing anyway - it's a joy to visit it with a car load. And the
council gave us a plastic composter for the garden, so all the waste
green food goes in there as well as some grass cuttings.

Car load is a problem - I don't (yet) have the dry storage for building up a
car load of recycling, and after the abuse the car has had with building
and moving, I don't want to hurt it anymore with wet muddy crates of
stuff...

I kept filling the Garden bin, so I rang the council, who's
response was 'OK, we'll send you a second one' - two days later it
arrived.

Yeah - I love running compost heaps. And the garden loves it too...

Guys, move to Allerdale! Or at least send your councillors here for
some education.

You'd better get the cattle prods ready for our lot.

--
Tim Watts

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