Bins: the saga continues.

Yes, come to Squander Two Blog for all your reading-about-bins needs. Fascinating stuff.

Anyway, yes, further to my generalised ranting about our new green bin —

All the houses in this street have small gardens. I generate enough garden clippings to fill this bin maybe twice a year, and I do a lot more gardening than many people. So isn't coming out to collect this thing in a big diesel truck every fortnight a horrible environment-damaging waste of resources?

— things have turned out to be both better and worse than I had thought.

The only reason I didn't have a compost bin up till now was to save space in a rather small garden. Since the council have ordained that I have to have a compost bin in my garden, I thought, well, may as well make it my own one and get to keep the compost for myself. And not having to lug it out for collection every two weeks will be nice, too. So I rang the council to tell them that I'm going to get my own compost bin, so don't need theirs, so could they come and take it away, please? I also rang a different department of the council to ask for a compost bin, because it turns out that they will provide me with one if I want, free of charge. I'm skint, so this is good. In an ideal world, I'd give them less tax in the first place and I'd be able to afford to buy my own compost bin, but hey. I don't really object to this particular use of taxpayers' money: while the council are in charge of waste disposal, it's good that they take measures to reduce the amount of waste of which they have to dispose. I imagine that issuing people with compost bins actually reduces costs.

Anyway, so that's the good bit. The bad bit is that they won't be able to collect the green wheelie-bin for two weeks, due to demand. It's not the two-week delay that's bad, but the demand: so many people are doing what I'm doing that the council have a two-week backlog of bins to take back. This means that a huge number of big plastic things have been manufactured and distributed by big diesel trucks totally unnecessarily and are now being undistributed again totally unnecessarily in order to reduce waste.