Rubbish

I have yet to understand the garbage pick up in our area. We have two bins outside our door, one has a blue top and is for recycling and the other one is green and is for garden and food waste. Do you see the problem? Apparently everything else goes in black bags (they have implemented a black topped bin but it's optional and we don't have room for it). The blue and green topped bins get picked up once a week and the black bags get picked up once every two weeks. This sounds simple enough as long as I don't forget which week is the black bag week.

The real problem is that picking up part. Our bins sit just off of our walk way right inside our gate. The truck comes by pretty early Monday morning and as far as I can tell, we don't have to put the bins out. See, the truck goes down the street with two people walking behind it. These people go, get your bin out of your yard, put it on the truck and put it back on the sidewalk in front of your house. This sounds all well and good but some weeks they don't get the bin out of our yard. I don't know if this depends on who is walking behind the truck that week or on how full our bin is.

The black bags are more of a problem. When we fill our can in the house, I take the bag out and just put it outside the front door and kind of behind our bush. The first week we had that there, the trash guy just got it from right in front of our house. I figured it was like the bins and I didn't have to put it out. Except that they don't always get it and as they only come fortnightly it can be bad if it's not picked up. Generally, I can tell if it's the black bag week by seeing other people's bags in front of their houses so I'm working on putting it on the sidewalk.

Another real problem is the garden and food waste. The council has provided little green buckets for our kitchen counter to keep the peelings and what not until we put them in the big green bin. This is all well and good but they don't want plastic bags in the green bin. At first I just didn't worry about it and put the food in the bucket then in the bin. Unfortunately, we don't have that many peelings and they can sit in the bucket for some time. I won't go into details but the bucket gets quite rank. So I gave up for a bit and just used grocery bags (surely everyone didn't put up with this) and put them in the bin when it was full. It still smelled but it didn't leave a lingering smell on the bucket even after it was cleaned. But then the trash people didn't empty our bin and put a note on it saying it was only for garden waste, no plastic bags and that they would send someone else to empty it. Apparently, they check your bin before they empty it! I think they are being unreasonable but I guess I just have to empty the bucket more often and not think about my stinky bin.