High winds made driving almost anywhere last week pretty treacherous. There were wheelie bins all over the road, scattering their disgusting contents all over our highways. And even when the weather’s fine, our streets and leafy lanes are now punctuated with ugly bins – they’re everywhere, in combinations of various hues. When I moved house recently, I had to acquaint myself with a new fortnightly round of days when the green bin would be picked up, mornings when the black and blue bins were permitted, and afternoons when the kitchen waste (or slop bucket as some councils insist on calling them) had to be put out, alongside a big green box for cereal packets, junk mail and old Christmas cards...
You spend much of your working week in a state of sweaty anxiety that you’ve put out the right combination of bins, and won’t be rejected by a bin man, armed with nasty orange labels which commit your bin to a three week boycott because you stupidly plonked recyclable plastic where only glass jars should go. So I was thrilled to hear that – at last – the nation’s housebuilders and architects are being ordered to address this concern. We are all fed up with the amount of bins we have to sustain (they’re like greedy mouths to feed). In some councils around here you have to have 6 different bin types. I’m, told one up North insists on 7! But if life is going to go on like this, then the town planners, the house builders and the architects MUST build for them.
They’re already spoiling the look of our towns and villages – but at least in new-builds, we must insist on more and more clever ways of hiding them. And in a life where space is big money – we’re going to have to learn to give up valuable living space (no more granny annexe) to the bins.
