Another example of guilty until proven innocent

How can the council prove that the rubbish in my bin is mine as the lid is not locked so anyone can open the bin. Then the next big issue is that I live in a row with 5 other houses and all our bins go out for collection in the same little area. The bin I take in Thursday this week may not be the bin I take in Thursday next week.

"I for one welcome...

...our wheelie-bugging cyber-bin overlords..."

Well, someone had to say it...

Jobsy, 'cause he's been selling chips attached to garbage for decades...

(and AC so the Mac-istas can't find me :P )

Odd combination

"Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)"

That's as bad as the US ATF, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Mine's the one with the pint of whiskey, pack of smokes (fags for you Brits), and shoulder holster sewed into the lining.

Must remember to not put the bin out

I'm lucky I can keep my bin at the back of the house -- out of the way of the possibility of fly tipping.

Will they get suspicious if the bin doesn't get emptied?

Is it cheaper to drive my rubbish to the local dump instead?

Will young whippersnappers go round leaving bins open when it's pouring with rain?

A new meaning to Moonlighting?

Cue the emergance of the new moonlighter - Filling up the neighbours bin

with your rubbish.

Only to find that the neighbours have swapped their BinChip with yours !

Only a govment that is so expert in IT could think of this.

Chip and bin?

I'll get me coat.

And they measure the amount recycled by?

The council round here are too inept at recycling. The only things they take are my non recyclable rubbish and my garden waste (thank goodness they've got around to doing that - I generate quite a load of grass trimmings and have much privet hedge, generating piles of trimmings several times a year).

Kitchen waste now please - If other councils can manage high temperature composting (enabling all kitchen waste, including cooked meat and bones) to be recycled I don't see why they all can't.

All the recyclables go to the local tip because the council won't collect half of it, and only supply tiny little red boxes, not nearly enough space for a fortnightly collection.

The trip to the tip is combined with a shopping trip, adding perhaps 300 yards and 3 minutes to the journey.

The newly refurbished tip is a joy to use, and there is always someone there to help if you have any awkward items.

So my recycling rate according to the council - 0%

My real rate - Don't know. Just done some back of envelope calculations and I reckon its 50% ish

Dumping

Next we will have to pay to use the lav, but if they try to chip me or my bog, I'll see them all here.

Phew, it's hot, no coat needed.

ffs... anyone can see the massive problems this will cause...

1) i have to put my bins out at 7:45 am, before i go to work. the bins then sit there an hour or so before the bin men come. any bastard can stick whatever they like in my bin and i know nothing about it!

2) i recycle a lot so my black bin hardly ever goes out. will they be able to get an average of my yearly tippage? how will they take into account such things?

3) whats to stop someone just throwing litter into my bin whilst unattended? it could even be none-malicious but i can get fined for it!

4) whats to stop the always useless binmen from dumping their shit into our bins?

5) what if its pissing down with rain, my house is about 10 mins walk from a school, i can see the kids flipping back all the bin lids to let them fill with water so we all get screwed...

6) its hard to be annoyed with people who do not recycle after finding my council (Lincoln) wasnt recycling lots and was, in fact, dumping it. WE then get fined by the GOV through council tax hikes due to this council's shite behaviour!

this is just a farce! what next? scanning our sewage to see if we have been smoking 'killer' skunk or 'binge drinking' (when i was younger we had binge drinking - it was the fucking weekend!)

so, the question is.... do all politics degress come with a lobotomy?

ahhh fuck the black choppers!

Huh ?

I thought Gordan promised not to roll this out ?

Personally if they roll out microchipped bins in my area I will in the spirit of being pissed off remove the chips and jump up and down on them.

We already suffer in my area with kids opening the bin lids and then they fill with water.

Also your bins end up with other peoples rubbish in them.

If they do this a V style march on London will be called for.

Kill the Chip

As it's probably just a standard RFID chip then just kill it with a microwave or some other suitable device depending on where the chip is.

Get a cheapo RFID scanner just to ensure it is dead and then just throw whatever you like.

If the council complain, tell them that you don't know what happened - blame it on an electrical storm if you like and that you'd love them to replace the bin (at *their* expense).

Then go round and randomly blast a few other bins near you, wait for the council to replace these bins.

With the cost of wheelie-bins, I can't see this making any money at all!

I wonder

what would happen if you collected all the chips from all the bins on one road, and put them into one bin just in time for the collection...

Paris? 'Cos she's as clueless as our Government seem to be....

Another law...

Obviously nobody has noticed the other law that our beloved dictators have sneaked in allowing councils to insist that all such bins are locked shut. Failure to comply will bring the usual prison sentence, fines, etc while the real criminals (rapists, murderers, politicians, etc) get off scott free because they're too much trouble to prosecute and not profitable enough.

The alternative plan, of course, is to find the addresses of your local councillors and just dump your rubbish in their gardens - taking care to remove all addressed items first, of course.

Oi! Councils, NO!

If this starts up in my area I'm going to turn uban gorrila on them.

How about dumping as much rubbish as I can in the gardens of high ranking members of the council? Not my own rubbish mind, no point in making is easy for them to trace me ;)

AC because they could be watching me right now...

Why no alternative before punishing people?

Why doesn't the government offer an alternative to over use of packaging BEFORE stressing people out with these fruitless fascist efforts?

Simple solution

These chips are easy to interrogate and clone, the hardware is cheap and the software readily available. What you do is;

1) Pull / drill out the chip module in your bin

2) Use a hand held reader to read the bin RFID of the nearest MP who voted for 42 days detention

3) program said ID into the new, read-write chip in your bin (a couple of quid on eBay)

4) post the ID # on the Internet so lots of other people can also bill their rubbish to those who really should pay

just burn it

Bedfordshire council have some plot of land that is going to be used for incinerators, 10% used, so space for another 9 incinerator units.....

Guess they will be importing rubbish from london as per usual ?

Next door neighbours are poles, they have lots of rubbish, if it ends up in my bin, it will get dumped on the road

Is your electricity meter spying on you as well?

Shouldn't power be charged at a flat rate however much you use? How is garbage different, then?

There is a simpler way of doing this. Don't have bins, have council pattern garbage bags on sale at supermarkets for $5 or whatever, including collection. That's how it works here in Wellington, NZ. Or, you can go to an alternative garbage collector who provides a bin.

re: Use your neighbours bin!

My neighbours are already practicing for this. Where I live 6 flats share a common bin area with a bin each. We use about a third of our bin capacity over a week. Two of the neighbouring flats seem to have a serious fetish for heavily packaged consumer goods and use all bins for their crap. All 6 bins are usually overflowing with 3 days to go before collection. My East London council couldn't give a rats arse about this or the attendant health issues, and will doubtless similarly not care when they charge me for my neighbours 'fly tipped' crap.

Paris, 'cos anywhere on earth is better than Newham

useless

We simply pay according to the size and number of bins. In the neighbouring council it's by how often it's picked up. Never heard of abuse by neighbours. I guess Brits are just too unruly to be trusted to play by the rules.

Trash Billing

If the council are charging for the rubbish I throw away (although I stupidly thought that was what Council Tax was for?) can I expect an itemised bill at the end of each month like my credit card?

In line with 'Green Credentials' will my council rather than sending a paper copy out then create an eTrash statement administered wholly online, and allowing you to charge heathens who still recieve the paper version?

And will the administration of this in some data centre cost more in resources and council tax than just collecting the bloody stuff in the first place?

I seem to be getting more and more confused as to what the point of all this is.........

I don't see the problem

Someone who uses energy-saving light bulbs and switches off appliances at the wall when not in use pays less for their electricity than someone who leaves filament light bulbs and electric heaters blazing away in unoccupied rooms.

Someone who has a high-efficiency combination boiler and TRVs on all radiators pays less for their gas than someone who leaves pans uncovered and has an inefficient, permanent-pilot boiler with a poorly-insulated, gravity-fed hot water cylinder.

Someone who drives a small, efficient car when absolutely essential and sticks to Shanks's Pony when it isn't pays less for their petrol than someone who runs a four-wheel-drive with automatic transmission and insists to drive anywhere further than the end of the street.

Someone who has a dual-flush toilet, takes only showers, makes sure they have a full load before running their washing machine or dishwasher and uses a rainwater harvesting system for watering their garden pays less for their water than someone who has a leaky swimming pool, takes two deep baths a day and wastes a full bowl of hot water to wash up just one cup.

So why the fuck should I pay the same amount to have a two-thirds-full wheelie-bin removed about once every six weeks, as somebody who puts out an overflowing wheelie bin every single week?

What a load of moaning bitches

The idea's good. STFU and help make it work. Why should I have to pay the same to throw my stuff as someone who has twice as much? It will make people think twice about how much packaging they buy with their shopping and increase pressure on supermarkets to stop selling vegetables in trays etc. Those complaining about dishonest neighbours protest too much I think. Maybe if you got on better with your neighbours you wouldn't have a problem?

They're targetting the wrong end.

To my shame, I work in one of these local red tape manufacturing plants that we call councils. Our recycling figures (across our county) are at 40% and they want to get it up. The trick is this ... people can only recycle what they buy which IS recyclable.

If the government want to target someone, then get on the backs of the manufacturers to sort their packaging out, not penalise residents for not being able to recycle more.

Green & Blacks chocolates is a case in point - I had a go at them in Dec 2006 for their package waste. I was surprised a year later when they sent me another box of chocks - packaging completely redesigned - only the chocolates themselves were wrapped in virgin paper and the box was made from recycled paper; the plastic tray had gone completely and even the plastic see through window was reduced to half of its previous thickness. The whole box took half the space of its predecessor and that had savings in storage and transit costs to boot.

Congratulations Greene & Blacks for a stunning performance ... and get on yer bike government; and don't run any red lights while you're at it.

Hidden Chip

Apparantly they did a trial round here with some bins - I've checked mine with an RFID scanner so know mine doesn't have one, I'll have to pop and see some friends out who live a few miles away.

Gotta be fun to play switch-the-chip. Just doing it once a month on a handful of bins will mean that the councils data is totally incorrect.

Probably the next step will be a nice LCD on the back of the bin lorry to tell them which house the chipped bin should belong to so it ensures that the right chip ends up back at the right house after a week.

All those people who painted their house number on their wheelie bin might be a bit confused why the binmen keep giving their bin to someone else though!

Fly tipping anybody?

The best statement we've had from the government about this is that it will reduce the incidence of fly tipping? What!? How? The only thing it will do is increase fly tipping. Your local authority will then, in effect have to pay for the clean up twice. First they will have to pay for the clean up then they will have to pay fines for missing their targets on fly tipping.

They will fund this by increasing the charges that honest people will pay for filling their bins, which will increase fly tipping further, and so we enter a positive feedback loop.

But the government will not accept any responsibility for all this because they have stated that councils have free will in all this. The sad thing is that the government seriously believe that they won't get the blame just because they've told us it isn't their fault.

Next step:

There will be a scale at the entrance to each bus, tube and train entrance, which will then check how much you weigh and then charge you weight and distance to your destination. It only makes sense when they are trying to charge you for every little thing.

Works in Dublin

Apparently. You get rebates if you do it properly. I wonder if any Irish readers would care to comment??

Tax creep...

Our income taxes used to pay for regular collections.

Then poll/council tax was introduced to fund for the service (telegraph.co.uk: "At present the £125 of the average council tax bill goes to cover the cost of rubbish collection and disposal"), but the income tax didn't reduce.

Council taxes inexorably increased.

Now we have to pay again - again, for the same service, yet our council tax still goes up.

On top of that the collection rate substantially reduced (bi monthly, about to be made monthly), so the cost of the service is substantially reduced.

Then you have the 'two finger' rule where a binman will refuse to take the bin if they cannot move it using two fingers, even though they have 8 available per man.

Then there is the closed lid rule where failure to abide can get you a criminal record.

Then we have the 7:30am rule where putting out rubbish earlier than that on the day of collection will see you fined (I know people that leave for work at 6:00am, WTF should they do?)

God help you if you accidentally put the wrong sort of rubbish into the wrong bin, even if the council mixes it all up anyway.

Furthermore, it has been stated that a bin with a damaged chip will not be emptied.

As someone touched on above, a law will be / has been snuck in such that the bins have to be padlocked.

To those who voted these f***ers in: do you still believe you won? Don’t you instead feel like we are the laughing stock of the world?

Did you know that throwing paper/cardboard in a landfill acts as a carbon sink? (and a renewable one at that) - that is, if you believe we can really can ‘stop/curb/tackle climate change’!

so that's it then

It's pitchforks and torches at 7 at the council.

Of all the things to get pissy about

Seriously guys. Get a grip.