Your bins might not be collected for a MONTH?? Blimey, that's just not on. I could see it creating some real environmental health problems, especially if they miss the August b/h collection and they don't come until two weeks later. Consider:
The hottest time of the year,
leftover food (especially meat - pheeeww!!) rotting for a month on the street,
You're bound to have filled up your wheelie bin in two weeks max, so some of it will be sitting in binbags on the ground (exposed for foxes/rats etc to rip open), and...
Round here at any rate, the refuse collectors will ONLY handle the wheelie bins - they won't touch a binbag. So what happens to the overflow? People will start putting the extra bags in the boot and dumping them in layby's or wherever, resulting in the council having to clean it up, resulting in even higher council tax increases.
Ah well, we'll probably all have died from bird flu by August in any case, so not to worry.

The problem doesn't seem to be recycling: it's Stupid Bloody Councils.

> Round here at any rate, the refuse collectors will ONLY handle the wheelie bins - they won't touch a binbag.

Same here. So you do your best to compress the rubbish (or I did, before I started putting little bags of dog crap in the bin - no way am I going to put pressure on that), which means occasionally the bin bags get a bit stuck in the bin, so they don't always just fall out when the bin's upended. So you get your bin back 3/4 full.

Which is why my next door neighbour's garden mysteriously fills with bin bags at 3am.

> Your bins might not be collected for a MONTH??

No, our bins will not be collected for a month.


> Round here at any rate, the refuse collectors will ONLY handle the wheelie bins - they won't touch a binbag.

The Northern Irish ones have just started that scam in the last few weeks. It made the news and everything. They're refusing to touch any bins which are even slightly overfull; if the lid's ajar, no matter how little, they leave the bin full.

I'm seriously tempted to dump excess at the Town Hall.

> The problem doesn't seem to be recycling: it's Stupid Bloody Councils.

It's also the environmentalist lobby, who give the councils the moral self-justification to go foisting this on people in the first place. If this were genuinely a service people wanted, the councils might be a bit better about providing it. That they can brand anyone who complains as an enemy of the planet means they don't have to address genuine problems or, really, give a shit about anyone.

I don't know if it's different over there, but the recycling targets here are an Executive thing that the councils follow. Some more exuberantly than others, naturally.

According to today's Grauniad, one english council lops £100 off people's council tax bills if they get their house insulated. A similar thing for recycling would get people's attention.

> one english council lops £100 off people's council tax bills if they get their house insulated.

Lower taxes for people who have enough disposable income to spare on insulating their houses and higher taxes for the poor, in other words. It's funny, the things that environmentalism does to Socialism.

And I bet that council's overall tax take still increases each year.

> Lower taxes for people who have enough disposable income to spare on insulating their houses and higher taxes for the poor, in other words.

Aha! I know about this, and you're wrong :) There's a huge range of grants available for energy efficiency, and typically if you're on a very low income or a pensioner then you can get thousands of quid's worth of work done for nowt. Even if you aren't, there are still grants available, although it differs from council to council.

> I bet that council's overall tax take still increases each year.

The clue to that is in the word "council" ;-)

Incidentally, it's council tax increase time here at the moment (4.5% increase where I am). But Glasgow froze its council tax by - shock horror! - making cuts to non-essential things, so for example art galleries will close on mondays and leisure centres will have shorter opening hours.

Naturally the Evening Times was appalled.

> I know about this

Damn. I should really stop bluffing.

But hang on: they're giving people tax incentives to take out grants? Isn't the grant an incentive for itself? They'll pay you to take money from them? Weird.


> Glasgow froze its council tax

About a thousand years too late. What did they freeze it at? All your worldly goods and your first-born son every six months?

Have they started experimenting with that new tax-collection scheme that's all the rage with some other councils? Apparently, if a council collects taxes, they end up with more money.

> The clue to that is in the word "council"

Well, yes. My point, though, is that they're not cutting your tax by £100 a year — if they were, they'd end up with less money. What they're actually doing is increasing everyone else's by £100 a year.

> About a thousand years too late

Heh. Yeah, it's down to 7% above the national average, rather than the 30% it used to be.

> What they're actually doing is increasing everyone else's by £100 a year

Oh, I agree. But that's the whole taxation-as-making-people-do-stuff approach.

> Yeah, it's down to 7% above the national average, rather than the 30% it used to be.

You mean, the national average is up to 6% below Glasgow's, rather than the 23% it used to be. But you knew that.

When I lived on Worthing seafront a couple of years ago, I was very impressed to see that our rubbish was collected daily - until I realised that this was because if it wasn't, gangs of seagulls would rip open the bin bags (the flats opened out into the street and there were no side alleys, so bins weren't an option) and scatter the contents all over the street.

So there's your answer: start breeding seagulls.

That's a superb plan.