Our small block of six flats has...

• Six Black Wheely Bins - for general waste
• 3 blue Wheely bins - for paper/cardboard
• 3 Brown Wheely bins - for glass/plastic bottles
• 1 Big Green Wheely bin - for garden waste/food waste

...and no fecking room to park your car with all the bleedin' bins littering the place up!! Seriously, that's 13 wheely bins for 6 flats. One each of the blue and brown bins would be sufficient, as it is they're only half full anyway.

A revised scheme, due to start next week, makes it all the more confusing...

One week your blue bin is emptied, the next week your brown bin is emptied (so far so good), then on a blue bin week your black bin is also emptied (Hmm, OK...I think) and every third week your green bin is emptied (nope, lost me), unless it's a Bank holiday in which case it's either every two weeks or four weeks. Seriously, you need to be fecking Einstein to remember which bins to put out! This week should be carnage on the streets, I'm quite looking forward to it!

We have

1 large black for general waste
1 large green for paper waste
1 large yellow for plastic waste
1 small brown for bio and garden waste

Pick ups here are every 2 weeks for brown and black, 3-4 weeks for the others.

Then allow for the fact that they will fine you if your bins are out on the wrong day!

It's always the same day (Wednesday), it's just maybe the wrong bins that may be out!! Hopefully they don't fine you for that - would be a bugger if you're colour-blind!

It is the same day here except after a bank holiday.

We have green bags for recycling, which are collected fortnightly and we can put out as many as we like. We have a black wheelie bin for general rubbish, which is collected weekly. We have a green wheelie bin for garden rubbish, which is collected weekly and we have food bags for certain wasted foods, which go into the green bin.

Rolls of the green recycling bags and the food bags are available for free from an array of local shops.

We have huge wheelie bins, but I've noticed the council have started issuing smaller ones (about half the size) to new properties/people who ask for replacements.

Smaller bins is the best way to encourage recycling. Though free composters and wormeries would also limit waste.

I'd agree, were it not for the fact these bins are patently too small for the size of the properties they are issued to - some of the houses are seven-bedroom, three-storey Victorian houses.

We have a large green bin for general waste and a large brown bin for garden waste. Also there are 2 small boxes for recycling (glass/tins and paper). Our collection day is Monday and they all get put out. One week they don't empty one of the large bins and the next week they don't empty the other. It's a foolproof system that has worked well for me but wait - there's more........

My house is situated on a corner where luck would have it is right on the boundary between two collection days - Monday and Friday. All I have to do is look up the street (on a Monday or Friday) and if there's no bins to be seen I stick everything round the corner

Al

Yes but even they have no reason to be more wasteful than the average household. My parents had an eight bed place but they had the same waste as the house next door. If the house was split into flats then they should all get a small bin.

How can a fully-occupied seven bedroom house be expected to produce the same amount of waste as a three bedroom property?

You might be amazed, but it can happen. Some are very wasteful.

Now we've moved house recycling has got a lot more complicated, we now have a black bin for landfill emptied every weds, green bin for garden waste, which is emptied every other tues alternating with the recycling as below:

Red box: glass, tins
Orange bag: plastics
Yellow bag: cardboard
Red bag: textiles
Blue bag: paper.

Now we're building a compost heap so a lot of the paper/cardboard type things go on there which is good, however when we start mowing the paddock we'll be filling a green bin every week so I have called and asked for another one to be delivered which they are doing free of charge sometime this month. As a household we generate one black bin bag worth of landfill waste a week so the bin is never overflowing and generally I'm pleased with the collections, but the division of the recycling is a PITA especially since they don't use a segmented van, they just chuck it all in a big van.

I don't mind really, but it's just encouraging me to think more creatively about my recycling, for instance we have a couple of bins in the paddock that I am using to keep stuff dry that we want to burn so a lot of the cardboard stuff is going there now rather than into the recycling, we're using meat dishes etc to collect compost material in the kitchen so they are being reused at home rather than recycled. That type of thing.

I presume you're using the heat from the fires you make.

Yes, to cook on, jump over and drink 'round, also the light will be used to help us see in the dark so we can stay out later.
As an aside, as soon as we've got the ok from the chimney sweep we'll be burning this type of thing in the fire in the dining room which also serves the back boiler.