The hunt for bin London: why nothing makes a Londoner rage like bad trash habits

Are you feeling a bit wasted? Is it all just a load of rubbish? There’s a bin battle going on in the capital, says Rosamund Urwin
20 March 2014

A war is being waged on London’s streets. Neighbours have turned on neighbours. Those in flat conversions smile sweetly at the other inhabitants as they pass on the stairs, but back in their pads they stick pins into voodoo dolls modelled on “the bastards in flat B”. And everybody — everybody — curses the council.

What are they fighting over? Bins. Skips. Rubbish. For nothing can make a Londoner rage like bad trash habits. And there could soon be extrafodder for our fury: David Laws, the education minister, suggested yesterday that councils should be encouraged to charge for bin collections. In Birmingham, residents already have to fork out £35 a year for their garden waste and recycling to be collected.

This rubbish war is close to my heart. Before November I lived in Southwark, the Shangri-La of waste, where bins are big and plentiful and neighbours mostly well-behaved. Then I crossed into Lambeth, garbage Gehenna. The council has decided to replace 240-litre bins with 140-litre “slimline” versions — a move one local has dubbed the “Lambeth bin snatch”. The collectors won’t take your rubbish if your bin is too full to close or if the bags spill over onto the street.

Which would be fine if I lived alone but there are three households sharing my dustbin — and one of them doesn’t seem to understand that the orange recycling sacks are supposed to sit on the street, not in the bin. Nor do they bag up their rubbish. So I regularly spend Monday nights pulling cardboard out of the bin so my own black sack can fit inside. My gloves now carry the scent of curry sauce.

Then there are the brown food waste bins, so light that many blew away in the recent storms. If you don’t recycle food waste, the council warns that you may be fined £1,000. But how can the council know who the baddies are in a shared house with communal bins? Lambeth isn’t alone in its trash tyranny. In Waltham Forest a resident says the council told them it would collect cardboard after Christmas if it was left outside. The cardboard sat there so long it turned to mush. Neighbours are often the enemy too. A Southwark resident tried to turn sleuth to discover who was dumping rubbish in NHS bio-waste bags in her front garden. Foxes would scatter the contents — a used nappy was once shredded across their yard — but she never found out who was doing it.

Meanwhile, in Islington, a local says that her recycling bins keep being stolen as soon as the council delivers them.

Others tell even worse tales. In one part of Bethnal Green the squirrels keep attacking the waste bags. Another Islington resident recalls a man raiding their rubbish in the middle of the night. “We didn’t want to go outside because he looked really manic and there were only three of us girls in the house,” she says. “The next morning we spent a couple of hours with gloves and bin bags putting it all back.”

But the story that makes me shudder most is the fellow Brixton resident who opened her bin only for a rat covered in lettuce to run up her arm.

Sometimes we are made to look like the sinners. A friend who is eight months pregnant says if she doesn’t bring the bins back in the instant the rubbish has been collected, a neighbour will wheel her bin so it sits in front of her front door and she can’t leave without moving it.

Still, even on this most vicious of fronts, there are rare acts of human kindness. “When my dad had a triple heart bypass, my mum started noticing that someone was secretly sneaking into our garden and putting the bins out for her and returning them after the bin men had gone,” a friend tells me.

“It turned out it was our next-door neighbour, who wanted to do something to help our family without our knowing. A pensioner, he thought taking out the bins was a man’s job, not one for my mum.”

A touch sexist, yes. But when you’re in the middle of a bin war, you’re grateful for every ally you can find.

TRASHY COUNCILS

BYOB (bring your own bin)

While Camden will provide you with wheelie bins for recycling and compost, you have to provide your own for non-recyclable waste, and it will have to fit in to its colour scheme. No greens — as this will clash with the recycling bins. Only black or grey, please.

They clean up good

Kensington and Chelsea will collect your rubbish twice a week, even on bank holidays. If you have a storage shed for bins, keep them there, otherwise leave them on the pavement — as near to the kerb as possible. They need to be out before 7am in the morning, but no cheating and leaving them out the night before.

Bin it in Barnet

In Barnet you have to be organised to make sure your bins are at the boundary of your property for 6.30am. However, there is some respite — you don’t have to sort through your recycling, just chuck it all in the big blue bin.

No mess in Westbinster

You simply bag it and chuck it out at the edge of your property. For your recycling, either dispose of it in the brown bins provided or pile it up in a blue bag.

Mollie Goodfellow

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