Greenwich Council

Three weeks without a garbage collection!

Some background....

A short while ago Greenwich Council changed the waste disposal system. We used to have a simple system that any fool (me??) could understand. Rubbish went in to the bin (in the house) and was then transferred to the bin outside the house. Recycling went in to the recycling bin. Two bins, Two purposes, no problem.

Now...

Recycling goes in to the Recycling bin.. Great, I understand that... Nappy's go in to Orange nappy sacks.. Hmmm.. OK, but where are my nappy sacks? I ordered them quite a while ago... A month to be precise! Then these bags get put on top of the other bins, Oooohhh... that will be smelly in the summer. OK, I can deal with that. Garden waste goes in to the other bin (green top), OK, I can deal with that. Food waste goes in to the green top bin, still OK.... What about the other general waste? Put it in black black bags, but not just any old black bag, a "compostable" one, fine and?? put it in the green top bin? Nope. Just pile it up with the nappy bags on the floor!

So outside my house I have...

A Full blue topped bin for Recycling... OK
A Slightly full green topped bin for Food and garden... OK
A pile of orange bags full off smelly nappy's... NOT OK!
A pile of black bags full of... The rest... NOT OK!

The only real difference here is that the general rubbish is moved out to black bags and the nappy's to orange ones, the green bin will be empty most of the time as I do not do much gardening and we do not have that much food waste.

Would it not have made more sense to have the garden waste in the bags and the general waste and nappy's in the bin, away from fox's and, when it comes, heat.

The Problem

For the last 3 weeks they have not collected my rubbish, I have called repeatedly and been told they would do a missed collection, but it has never happened. We do not throw that much away, but the bin is now full! They have not deemed to tell us why they will not collect it. I suspect that this is because of the nappies, but no one will confirm this. It would be nice if they would send us the orange sacks so we can conform to the grand plan.

The thing is that they will not pick the bin up.
I will not climb into it to resort it.

So we have an impasse....

Right this minute I feel like taking the bin to Greenwich Councils offices and depositing the contents on their doorstep!

I have spoken to several Greenwich residents about this, some of them work at the council, would you believe, and they all agree that this is a silly system and whoever thought of it needs a slap with a wet kipper. Apparently they had a very high volume of calls initially, this has now dropped to a constant rumble, so I cannot be the only one suffering from this foul-up.

At last, after me calling them 10 million times I have had a call back from the directors office and a very nice lady, who's name I will not mention as it is not her fault, has said she will see what she can do. It is a bit late in the day for this (literally), but I have been trying all day...