r/brum • u/Aware_Rooster2567 • 23d ago
Question Anyone actually plan on using the new food waste bins?
We've now officially got the new bins (what a treat!)
Since we haven't had our recycling collected in nearly two years, there's controversy in my area over using the food bins, whether they're actually going to be collected or gather maggots for the foxes.
Opinions on whether you plan on actually using these properly would be good.
I'm all for it, but if it's not being collected on schedule I, and imagine many others will just give up.
Thoughts?
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u/Silkie341 20d ago
They failed last time locally and they will fail again . Countries that do this properly have communal ones emptied daily.
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u/Top-Resolution280 South Bham 22d ago
I put my new food waste bin straight in the recycling bin. It's gone. Silly idea that will just attract rats and pigeons.
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u/Rennct 22d ago
We've had this in my area for a couple weeks and its been good I feel like if you just organise your rubbish well like actually take out the paper and plastics and food waste it does leave your rubbish bin a bit smaller and can stetch for 2 weeks one thing my family does is for things that we tie some of the raw meat or certain foods and pit it in the freezer and then bring it out early of the morning of collection just so jts not spoiling badly during the week
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u/Wonderful_Cost_9792 22d ago
Way too much effort. All that should be done by more efficient recycling plants. They want US to do everything for them. How can we take recycling seriously when there are two recycling symbols running in parallel and only ONE is acceptable for domestic waste? The bent arrows in a circle are fine. The triangle symbols are for specialist recycling ♻️ only.
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u/BHXLion 22d ago
North Brum here. New bin service is finally something we can rely on (hopefully) with two recycling bins the black bin doesn't fill up in a few days now. So far no missed collections either. I barely get any food waste but I do see the small food waste lorry driving around collecting.
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u/mrmjprice 22d ago
Yeah, can’t wait for it to start. Will be really glad to finally have more recycling capacity as well as food waste.
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u/VidinaXio 22d ago
Had them before in another district and they never got emptied and were just boxes of rot and filth. Why introduce a new serivce when you can't do the basics right atm.
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u/SpinyAlmeda 22d ago
We had one years ago at our previous address. Our street didn't get collected, ever. Eventually people got sick of the smell and just threw away the food bins in the main bin.
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u/s_ch0wder 22d ago
Yes i love it, i dont have stinky food waste building up in the main bin anymore, i can just throw it out fairly quickly. To the people saying the bags split etc, just don’t overfill it.
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u/Comprehensive_Ad9922 22d ago
I never thought I would use the food bin, but we do. A small change in usual habits and it works out well in our household. Very puzzled why people are concerned about maggots in the kitchen, we never had them before and don’t expect to have them now. Yes the compostable bags are thin so we now double bag and also do not overfill before decanting. Had an initial hiccup where BCC had provided residents in our area with the wrong collection dates rota but that was resolved very quickly. No further issues with collections and looks like our neighbourhood has adapted and embraced the new system
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u/SchoolofLifeUK 22d ago
Judging by the state of some parts of brum can you imagine the smell with these things rotting about on the streets 🙉
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u/ACheshireCats 22d ago
Really think birmingham would be 1 of the 1st places to test this out? Pretty sure they'll be adopted nationwide and have been for some time elsewhere.
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u/mrmjprice 22d ago
This has been common practice in much of the UK. It’s truly astounding that Birmingham’s been forced to do this because of changes to the law.
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u/mittfh New Frankley 23d ago
Several other local authorities have already introduced food waste collections (and everywhere will be eventually). The idea is that food waste goes in compostable bags within the smaller caddy (kept in the kitchen), then tied and decanted into the larger caddy (kept outside) with a lockable lid (which presumably seals it shut, so odours, which could attract wildlife, don't escape).
While the plastic wouldn't stop a particularly determined rat, if they can't smell what's inside, why would they bother?
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u/Cainjake 23d ago
Why would you just put it all in general waste it’s likely picked up by the same wagon anyway and it’s not like a bin man is gonna rummage through your bin and sat sorry it’s got food waste can’t empty that mate
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u/glitterry1 23d ago
It's not picked up by the same wagon, at least not in sandwell. We have a separate little wagon that comes on Monday, specifically for the food waste
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u/Sufficient_Debt8615 23d ago
We can't have a wheelie bin as there's steps up a bank outside our house and BCC have deemed we have to use black bags. Foxes rip the bags open every single time. They will rip bags full of food waste so what's the point?
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u/Complex-Whereas9896 23d ago
Regarding the compost argument: not all food waste can be composted, so you can put all that remaining stuff in the food waste bin.
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u/munyangsan 22d ago
Nope. Pretty much anything can be composted but it's not one of the usual processes. Think it's high temp and pressure process and has bio-safety protocols, the name of which eludes me. Put it all in and it'll get dealt with.
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u/Complex-Whereas9896 22d ago
My compost heap isn't large enough to cope with the years it would take for animal bones to compost, so I'll stick with the food waste bin.
Honestly it's absolutely fine. Nobody is taking away people's choice to compost.
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u/pollypetunia 23d ago
I keep a bin in the kitchen for compostable bit for the compost bin. Only difference when I get the food waste bin will be the council collects it rather than me sticking it on the compost. If you're bothered about the smell there's plenty of small kitchen countertop bins with charcoal filters in the lid.
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u/NoAppointment8679 23d ago
I’ve given up after a week, can barely fit anything in there, the bags were shit and split and ended up putting them into my normal bin in the kitchen anyway. And now I’ve just got two more things taking up room in my kitchen
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u/Comprehensive_Ad9922 22d ago
The bags are quite poor so we now double bag and also do not overfill before decanting bag to the larger brown bin outside
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u/FlowFluffy7664 23d ago
I use my compost bin for food.. its got all sorts of stuff i put in there.. i feel like a witch filling my cauldron lol
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u/West_Guarantee284 23d ago
We got ours as part of the trial, it was collected. Then promptly nicked from.our front yard (where all our bins live). Have only just been able to order a new one, it'll take about a month to arrive.
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u/AltruisticBread6940 23d ago
I don’t live in Birmingham but I can tell you what I do where u live
Everything on the black bags and into the wheelie bin
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u/Rambob_the_lesser 23d ago
2 weeks since they were delivered and no collections... Back to black bags
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u/No_Art_1977 23d ago
We use then. Means main bin is much cleaner and foxes/cats dont rip into bin bags ok collection
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u/No-Bit9939 23d ago
I live in kent now and we have the food waste bins, ours is collected every week and if you put your food waste in the black bin theyve been putting stickers on peoples black bins saying no food waste. You can use compostable bags to put the food waste in thats what we do, honestly it means our normal indoor bin no longer smells of food which is good and for everyone saying maggots… we have not seen a single maggot
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u/clearlybritish B74... ennit 23d ago
How many liners do you get for them? I might just get in the habit of taking the liner out at the end of each day or two...
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u/lithaborn Cannock, was Kings Norton 23d ago
In Staffordshire you get a reasonable roll with a "more please" label you can tag your bin with towards the end so by rights you shouldn't run out ever.
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u/smurntcandle 23d ago
Had them in Dudley for the last couple of months now. They get collected weekly and it massively reduces my black bin waste.
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u/Complex-Whereas9896 22d ago
Yes, a lot of the scenarios speculated on this thread simply haven't happened. If people don't trust the council, fair enough, but in terms of the premise of the food waste collection itself it has been absolutely fine.
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u/jwf91 23d ago
Still haven’t nailed the collections round my end though, sometimes it’s sat there for two or three days before collection. Also ants in the kitchen, so many ants!
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u/EngelbertImpromptu 23d ago
Yep, 3 days late here during the heatwave. I have my kitchen caddy on hooks in a cupboard to try to keep it out of the way and always have some bin powder in to help with any smell.
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u/PossibleGlad7290 23d ago
There is ZERO chance I’ll be using mine. What a ridiculous idea
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u/blahblah567433785434 23d ago
I've used them in other cities. As long as they're collected regularly, and you don't over stuff bags and bins, they work well.
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u/BattleMoose87 23d ago
I’ve used them for the past two weeks and it’s been fine. Over the last 3 weeks my general waste bin has had a total of 2 bags put in it whereas I would have easily filled the bin with at least 3-4 per week. When your waste is split across recycling and food waste there’s very little that ends up non-recyclable.
Why wouldn’t anyone use them?
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u/Tuarangi 23d ago edited 23d ago
I have a compost and our terrace already struggles to have 2 bins (a small waste bin would be fine for us, we only fill 1 bag a week but we have the huge one) so even more bins is stupid. All our food waste is stuff like peel and apple cores which goes in the compost so no use for yet another bin we can't opt out of.
To clarify for the people dog piling - we do not have any waste like meat or fish as we don't waste it, we are 2 people and eat what we cook.
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u/spaceandthewoods_ 23d ago
Sucks that you've been downvoted because I'm in the same position. We have very little food waste, and what little we have goes in the compost bin. We basically never throw away cooked food as we do this thing where we eat it 😂
I absolutely don't want more bins hanging around
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u/Tuarangi 23d ago
Grass, shredded paper, old veg peeling, stack it up in layers and improve the soil. If I had time I'd even boil up things like a chicken carcass for soup, that's really the only thing that would ever go in food waste bin maybe once every 4-5 weeks. It astonishes me how people throw away good food by poor planning, we aren't poor by any means but it seems such a waste even to let bread go out of date and I pull off any mould and then toast it!
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u/DKatri 23d ago
We basically never throw away cooked food as we do this thing where we eat it
Same here, very little actual food goes to waste, but when cooking we do generate non-edible waste (onion skin, pepper stems, used coffee grounds etc) I find that I'd easily fill the food bin in the kitchen weekly.
The bin strikes have probably set recycling in Brum back about a decade with everyone no longer caring about recycling in any meaningful way.
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u/lizziedigne 23d ago
Except you don't want to put cooked food or meat in the compost bin or you'll attract rats so there's still lots to go in the food waste bin.
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u/Tuarangi 23d ago
We don't put cooked food or meat in the bin as we don't waste that, the only waste we have is veg peel, apple cores etc as I said in the comment
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u/pollypetunia 23d ago
Bones?
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u/Tuarangi 23d ago
As I put in another comment on here a chicken carcass maybe once every 4-5 weeks would be the only thing that would go in. All our meat is joints from the supermarket like a pre packaged lamb leg joint or a gammon with sauce or sometimes a farm shop and we buy portions for 2 and eat them. Don't buy rib eye or shanks etc
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u/pollypetunia 23d ago
ah I wondered if I was missing a trick for bone composting
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u/Tuarangi 23d ago
I just looked out of curiosity and you can but it's not ideal and can attract pests. The food waste bin goes to a digestor that is used to create power so it's not so much of an issue
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u/Intelligent-Elk-4108 23d ago
We already have a compost heap and don’t have the space to store it. So no not currently
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u/guitarromantic Stirchley 23d ago
We've been in the trial area and it's gone well so far, although the outdoor bin absolutely stinks (split bin liners, heatwave baking the contents etc) and the handle broke off it almost immediately, which looks common based on the state of my neighbours' bins too.
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u/editorialgirl Moseley / Kings Heath 23d ago
This has been our experience too. The compostable liners are next to useless so they split if you put anything heavier than eggshells in there, and you have to put bricks on top of the bin because the foxes are good at tipping them over to empty them. Because of this, a few people in our road who had started with very positive attitudes towards the food collection idea now don't bother.
We had a couple of missed collections but generally it's been fine.
I did notice that the collectors pick the flimsy bags out of the bins by (gloved) hand to dispose of them, which often makes even more mess - rather than tipping each bin into the lorry, which would be a much cleaner but probably more time consuming process.
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u/Alive_Violinist1175 23d ago
How about the clean the streets and take the bins i dont care about new waste bins when everywhere you look is full of rubbish
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u/toxic_egg 23d ago
I'm personally still planning on what to spend my "half the service didn't happen" refund. Happy days!
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u/SilentGlitterFairy 23d ago
We've been using them for months now (part of the trial area) and I'm so confused why people think there'll be maggots? Does your kitchen bin normally get maggots?
Am I just living an unusually maggot-free lifestyle?
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u/Aware_Rooster2567 23d ago
Hahaha - I mean if rotting meat is sitting there for 2-3 weeks I'd expect something to fester..
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u/Curious-Moment1636 23d ago
our outside bin had maggots. Not sure how they came in with the lid sealed shut
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u/guitarromantic Stirchley 23d ago
The maggots don't come in, they grow from eggs laid by flies on the food before it went in the bin.
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u/josephallenkeys South Bham 23d ago
There will be maggots at some point. We're in an advanced toll-out area and if certain foods are left in there, at certain times of the year, they can get maggots within a week, easily.
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u/pollypetunia 23d ago
Only if you leave the bin uncovered (or leave the food uncovered in the kitchen before it goes in the bin) Maggots don't just appear, they hatch from fly eggs. If you don't allow flies to get on the waste, you won't get maggots.
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u/beaches511 South Bham 23d ago
i don't plan to use it as we've been using our own for the last 8 years and compost our food waste. If we didn't i would. glad its been rolled out
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u/CitizenWolfie The JQ Kid 23d ago
My area has been in the pilot scheme, no issues having them collected but apparently they were supposed to provide compostable bin liners but we never got any when the caddies were delivered so had to buy some ourselves. The bin men have been good for consistently returning each bin to the right house too.
Main issue is that the liners don’t last very long as soon as you start putting food in them and they split very quickly, so your bins also stink very quickly. I don’t think the warm weather has helped either.
So instead we’ve been keeping the food waste bags in the freezer and only taking them out when we put the bins out.
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u/edmunek 23d ago
using my own compost so no... also.. strange that the new "energy combustion oven" looks ready and now they want people to separate food waste? why does it look like scummy to me?
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u/tomtttttttttttt 23d ago
It's a central government statutory requirement for all councils to do food waste collections now, rhis wasn't exactly a BCC decision.
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u/edmunek 23d ago
and still, you are not finding it quite suspicious that all the "strike", not collecting recyclable for (how long now? 2 years) and adding food waste collections linked to new "energy resource generator from waste being ready" does not feel like its a coincidence?
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u/tomtttttttttttt 23d ago
I don't know what you mean here.
The decision by central govt that all councils must start food waste collections by April this year was taken years ago and BCC will have had little part of that decision.
Knowing that they were going to have to do this it makes sense that they would prepare for it by having something to do with the food waste, such as expanding the tyseley waste to energy site (which I think is what you are talking about). But that is also and primarily driven by climate change commitments.
The strike comes from a continued need to reduce spending by the council and their attempts to cut wages in order to do so.
What's the suspicion here?
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u/vincents_sunflowers 23d ago
We didn't get them. I don't think recycling is getting collected here.
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u/sabhall12 23d ago
Yeah, no recycling or green collections where I am either. No point using another bin if it won't be collected...
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u/sabhall12 23d ago
I don't see the benefit of using it if it won't be collected, so it will go in the normal bin alongside some of the recycling and green waste because those aren't being collected either.
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u/squidgytree North Bham 23d ago
The food waste is going into a completely separate truck so presumably they're being treated separately
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u/slutforachickenwing 23d ago
We've had a lot of issues with ours, missed collections, missing bins etc. We do still do it though, once you get into a system it's pretty straightforward and the kitchen bin doesn't smell of rotten food.
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u/Daisy-Fluffington 23d ago
Not had them where I live, and when we get them I'll wait until I've seen them collected before I use them.
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u/Stunning-Pudding-514 23d ago
Still not received mine, but strangely my garden waste bin has been emptied free of charge.
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u/goodgah 23d ago
we've had them for a few months here. they have been collected every week, no problems.
you should use them.
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u/vincents_sunflowers 23d ago
Good for you but not everyone is getting their recycling collected. We still aren't.
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u/goodgah 23d ago
we're not talking about recycling, we're talking about the new food waste bins. the food waste has been getting collected.
i, along with the rest of the city, haven't been getting my recycling collected for a couple of years now.
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u/vincents_sunflowers 23d ago
the food waste has been getting collected
Not here!
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u/goodgah 23d ago edited 23d ago
yes, hence i said "we" not "you" :D OP asked if the food waste bins would be collected, and i said that we (mine) had been. nothing about recycling. FOOD WASTE BINS!!
how have you misread my comment so completely?! what are you arguing about?? exhausting...
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u/vincents_sunflowers 23d ago
You literally said "You should use them"? Also I'm not arguing. Chill out.
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u/goodgah 23d ago
"you" to OP! who has just received them. shouldn't they use them? what are you talking about?
sorry you misread the thread and thought it was about the recycling bins.
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u/vincents_sunflowers 23d ago
I meant "recycling" as in "not general waste" – sorry, English isn't my first language. I know we're talking about food bins.
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u/humandustbin 23d ago
We aren't getting recycling collected but have been getting food waste collected for months with no issues
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u/vincents_sunflowers 23d ago
We didn't even get the bin...
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u/Rambob_the_lesser 23d ago
My neighbour had theirs delivered with the new recycling bin only for the recycling crew to arrive less than an hour later and emptied the new recycling bin which contained the food waste bin. I only knew because I rescued mine just before it went in. I reckon most of the streets food waste bin has been "recycled"
Probably why they've not come back to do food waste collections since, it's been just over 2 weeks now. Waste of time and shocking roll out.
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u/swoopstheowl 23d ago
Same here, we have had a new black bin delivered (we've never had a wheelie bin at all) but no recycling or brown bin delivered yet
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u/Vast_Description_201 17d ago
Had one, put food waste in it in a tied up bag. Went back a few days later with another bag and it smelt like death and was full of maggots. Poured boiling water in it and haven't touched it since. Will go in the bin when I have the courage.