Potters Bar Forum

Yet again the strategists at Hertsmere have let their collective stupidity ensure that a desirable environmental policy has fallen flat on its face. The latest addition to the recycling policy are the brown bins for recycling of cardboard and food waste. Well I say brown bins, they actually started as green bins in parts of Potters Bar during the initial "rollout", but turned into brown ones later in the supply programme. Presumably they "ran out" of green ones. No doubt a future opportunity for the council clots to invent even more ridiculous directives having created the banana skin of failing to standardise the basic colour of the receptacles with the nature of the waste. Can you imagine the sort of instructions they are going to dream up? Put your black bins out every Monday , your blue bins on a Tuesday every two weeks and your green ones two weekly but alternate to the blue ones, unless you live in the following roads..........where the blue are actually yellow and the green ones are brown......marvellous

However that is a problem for the future. The main point of this note was to ask which particular genius at Hertsmere Council decided on fortnightly collections of bins containing food waste during the summer months? Incidentally even this ridiculous collection target was missed for the vast majority of Potters Bar the collection was averaging three days late. Can the delay have been due to the state they found the bins in? By the time the refuse disposal people turned up most residents had acquired a healthy colony of maggots, flies, and a stench that necessitated parking the bin as far away from habitable access to the property as possible.

I for one have written to the Council Clots to enquire as to what they projected as the realistic collection interval for food waste that inside a plastic "Wheelie Bin" that is reaching internally over 100 degrees F. No answer of course.

I have also pointed out that they are possibly responsible for creating the largest public health hazard across the borough in living memory. Who are these people , why are they still employed? Why are paying them inflated salaries and overstuffed index linked pensions to impose this nonsense on us! Sack the lot and replace them with a toss of a coin, at least we would stand a chance of the CC's getting it right half the time.

I agree absolutely with all of your comments - and I hate the colour of my brown bin! At least the green bins blend in with the greenery and don't stick out like a sore thumb. My bin should have been collected yesterday but they are not coming until tomorrow now.

I know no-one asks us ... but would it not have been better rather than offering a bin to take away garden waste, to offer a free composter first?

I'm amazed that the council don't have recycling arranged well. I work in Hammersmith and they have transparent orange sacks which can take paper, wood, glass, plastic and metal, which are collected and recycled by the council.

I don't particularly want yet another wheelie bin, it takes me a month to fill the one I've got with rubbish, by the time I've taken paper, plastics and glass to the supermarket myself to recycle.

I think those garden composters are good, but don't they attract rats or mice or something like that?

I heard from a friend this weekend apparently the green bins are collected by one council lorry and the brown bins, another.

My green bin is swarming with flies!! Horrible.

Hang on, do you mean I'm going to end up with three bins, a green, brown and the grey one I've already got?

This is barking ... I don't throw food waste away, I eat it or freeze it! I cut my grass in summer about once a week and that ends up being two bin bags a month. My grey bin I put out once a month, mostly packaging, tea bags and stuff like that.

Worlds gone mad

Just when you thought it was safe to put your rubbish in the bin again they are back with avengance. The indefatigable HCC strategy think tank for refuse management has come up with another blinder. The new scheme builds seamlessly on the unparalleled disaster of introducing the green bins, 12 months ago; unless of course you were in the half of Potters Bar, where they forgot to order enough green bins so they were actually brown.

The upshot of that scheme was that the bio-degradable waste was to go into the green/brown bins and collected once a fortnight. Well surprise, surprise in the middle of summer with the internal temperature of the bins reaching 135 degrees F, the strategy boys managed to create the biggest public health hazard in Potters Bar in living memory.

Well beware now they are back for a rerun! Their latest idea runs under the title of ABC “Additional Bin Collections”. Somewhat of a misleading title really as it involves NO additional bin collections whatsoever! For the hard of thinking in HCC let me explain in simple terms that possibly they will understand.

Currently in a fortnight we get a black bin emptied twice, plus a Green/Brown and a blue once. Total, four collections, or simply two plus two equals four.

From November you will get your black bin, and a new black box (less than 25% the size of your black bin) emptied once a fortnight, plus the existing arrangements for the Green/Brown blue receptacles. So in a fortnight you will get four collections. Or simply two plus two equals four.

Well now we can all count up to four, let us move on to the more serious aspect of their mind numbingly stupid scheme. Did you notice that it will halve the collection of black bins? Now does the flaw in this plan sound familiar? Remember Plan A? Food waste in bins for two weeks in the middle of summer? How can even this bunch of clots be so stupid? Twice? Well let me elucidate. The rationalisation goes something like this, “we tell them they are getting more collections” (as you can see we are not) and then if that fails they will revert to “the same volume of waste is being collected over the period”. Which it is not as the black box is only 25% of the size of the black bin!

Well let me be perfectly clear on this, my dear clots, “This is not a volume issue it is a public health matter”! Do you not remember what happened last time? By the time the refuse disposal people turned up most residents had acquired a healthy colony of maggots, flies, and a stench that necessitated parking the bin as far away from habitable access to the property as possible.

To be fair the clots have learnt one basic lesson from last time around. If you have a daft scheme, that is going to cause chaos and a major public health hazard in the summer,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Then why not introduce it in the winter?  And so in November it will come to pass.

We were just following orders The Clots will cry! Its Government policy! Well when has that ever had any substance or sanity as its foundation? The scurrilous statistic of “over 90 local councils have already introduced it”, will also be banded about in sound bites. What will not be said is that the residents of these councils are up in arms about it!

So what can we do about it? For Barnet residents you can write to the Council, specifically Councillor John Hart (Con) who is against the scheme (it will add £3.8m to our CT bill), and also for balance, Councillor Geof Cooke (Lab) Woodhouse ward who is of course most vociferously for the scheme, calling the previous scheme a resounding success! What planet is he from? Unfortunately in Herts the Clots prefer to remain faceless.

If all else fails I suggest “non-compliance”. Put the degradable waste into whatever bin is being collected next. Some may call this sabotage; I prefer to define it as a public health initiative that saves £3.8m. I would really like to see a prosecution here, Lets get The Clots in court trying to explain how two + two is more than four and how health hazard creation is now Government policy. It will be marvellous entertainment.

You have been warned!

What are peoples views on the new rubbish collection.

They refused my green bin these week as it had wood in it.

I agree with recycling.. but how about going after the supermarkets regarding packaging first

Smiler Wrote:What are peoples views on the new rubbish collection.

They refused my green bin these week as it had wood in it.

I agree with recycling.. but how about going after the supermarkets regarding packaging first

I agree. Can't wait for the lovely aromas that fill our neighbourhoods over the summer months. It was bad enough with rotting garden waste in the green bins let alone all the other food matter we now have to put in it. I think this is more about cost cutting than recycling in the council's eyes. Some council spokesperson said in the WHT a couple of weeks ago. If you organise the disposal of your food waste properly each week you will not have problems with the smells (ie put it in green bin one week and grey bin the next week).

If we didn't have so much packaging on the products we buy at supermarkets we wouldn't have half as much rubbish. It is a nightmare trying to teach a busy family what goes where, and when. What to wash out and what bits they don't recycle (tops of plastic bottles). How they can't just put letters in the paper box without first shredding the address and then they need to remove the window from the envelope before they put it in the box and the window needs to be put in the normal bin (presume not the plastic bin). Our back door is opened loads of times each day as you can't put these things into your normal waste bins in the house otherwise they get buried with the other rubbish.

I don't have room for separate bins in my kitchen so whilst the council are probably saving money we are paying extra for heating while the back door flaps open and shut, using more water to rinse plastic bottles and cans (going to help the water shortage - not), paying for the liners for the kitchen caddys and paying for the petrol to drive down and buy them.

I have just picked up my free kitchen caddy from the Willyotts in the hope it will help.

Hopefully we will get to grips with it in the end.

Oh and the black plastic recycling box is so light the wind blows them and their contents all round the streets and into the roads.

Other than that I'm loving it.

I am so angry about the new recycling collection of plastic etc. After the recent few days of very strong wind, I woke up today to find most of my recyling half way down the road. Are we being enviromentaly friendly now, with rubbish all over the streets - I think not, what idiot in the Council thought of bringing bins without lids and not large enough to hold anything substantial!!!

I don't know whether I'm lucky or not but I didn't get a green/brown bin and don't really want something else cluttering up the place anyhow. The decision to not put a lid on the containers for plastic was a barmy one, after the winds most roads had plastic everywhere. It's too much clutter to have so many different collecting containers. Where I work, in Hammersmith, the residents get clear orange plastic bags which take paper, plastic, wood, glass, tins and cardboard. If the bag looks contaiminated by other waste they put a sticker on and don't collect it. Our council should learn from this as all around that area there are bags of recycling out every week.

I used to put the normal rubbish out about once every three weeks, just two of us living here but I don't like chucking food away so only buy what I need. I've no idea how neighbours manage to fill their bins in a week so quickly.

They also seem to be sometimes a week late with the recycling collection, I took the paper bin in at 6pm to stop the kids distributing it everywhere only to have them try to collect the next day. The plastic collection was the same.

Who plans this kind of idiocy?

Well its so surprising to see we are all getting on so well with the latest piece of idiocy from "the clots". Rubbish bins without lids, who really could have thought of that one? Its pure genius!

OK it was probably some dope in procurement who didn't realise that the lid was a different part number!. You know what will happen next , when the street cleaners go on strike in protest at all the airborne refuse we will all be issued with lids, and the bins will be a new model and the new lids will not fit our bins! Just following Clots Law. "having created a monumental farce, attempts to fix it will guarantee to make matters worse"

The recycling plan is disintegrating in front of their eyes. The pickups of the black bins are now in chaos, as half way round the refuse truck is full and has to return to the depot to be emptied. By the time this is carried out its to late to pick up the run where they left off and the second half of the route is abandoned. Now what part of "If you wait twice as long to empty it there is twice as much rubbish" was to difficult for "The Clotmaster" to grasp?

And as we enter pantomine season, what will the clots have in store for us? If your collection was due on Boxing day does that mean the black bins will not get emptied for a month? Who knows.

So what can we do? I suggest we all contact our local counciller, all their addresses are readily available, and complain. When that produces the usual political rhetoric that solves nothing and pacifies no-one, then adopt plan B. All overflow waste, (all neatly sacked of course) can be donated to the counciller's address. Rows of boxes with empty plastic bottles can be lined up, especially on windy nights. Oh what fun it will be to see the defence of the indefensible then.

Well the email address you need is abc@hertsmere.gov.uk to send your complaint, which is what I done.

I was told that lids aren't provided as it limits what can be stored in the box (go figure) and whilst they accept that a few plastic items will be blown about they consider the lidless box fine for the vast majority.

We shall see.

Christmas is coming and it will all turn to chaos. My visits to the tip have already increased.

I received a form this morning from the council about voting by post. Inside were three pieces of paper. One was the form, another a covering letter, and a third detail on how to fill out the form. The cover letter and detail on filling out the form were half a single side of A4 each, so all three pieces would have fitted on a single piece of paper if printed double-sided. It was also sent first class (don't think we're due elections until may, so no need for such speed?).

As residents we can try, but someone higher up still needs to think about everything they do otherwise our efforts are wasted

I don't know how many of the ~46000 voters in Hertsmere do it postally but even if it's only 5% that's still nearly 5000 pieces of paper that could have been saved and a few hundred pounds in postage!