My refuse team was apparently short staffed last collection day due to sickness, so the armpit-high bins in which we put paper, card, plastics, tins and cartons weren’t emptied. If we can’t fit everything we need to into that bin, we’re encouraged to leave our bulky waste cardboard next to it instead, to free up room inside for the other items that can’t be securely left in a pile on the ground and which would be difficult for the team to scoop up. As many of us had taken advantage of this ‘service perk’ to get rid of the last of our Christmas-related packaging last week, you can imagine the chaos in our gardens and on the road outside when Storm Goretti hit a couple of days after collection was supposed to have taken place, bringing two days of high winds and torrential rain! I’m pleased to report that everything appeared to have returned to normal after this week’s collection – which of course involved two weeks’ worth of residents’ recyclables crammed into the bins - but it must have taken some work and can’t have been pleasant for the team, scooping up sodden cardboard that had been soaking in deep puddles for several days, and attempting to chase down and capture the multitude of plastic bottles and food cartons that had been squeezed in the bins and which flew out when the lids were opened and scooted down the road driven by the still-heavy winds. 

A decent enough service then… or is it? 

As a child I recall everything being so much more relaxed,  with our ‘dustmen’, as they were called, coming down our paths and hoisting the metal bins onto their shoulders, carrying them back to the lorry and manually emptying them, before returning them to our homes. None of this ‘leave large bins blocking footpaths & chuck the smaller ones into the owner’s (or a neighbour’s) garden’ as we so often see today. If anything was spilled, it was immediately cleaned up and the path or road swept, so there were no visible signs that anyone had been there. These days everyone seems to be under too much pressure, having to work at a trot rather than at normal pace and leaving spillages for residents to clear up once we’ve relocated our bins. 

What’s changed? Yes the country’s more densely populated but surely this means that there are more people available to do the work which requires doing? Are the budgets so tight that we can’t employ large enough teams to ‘leave everything as they’d like to find it’? Or to cover for a colleague or two who’ve called in sick? Perhaps with the right-sized team, anyone surplus on the day could clear the drains, so in future, puddles don’t turn into rivers. We’re being threatened with service cutbacks. I dread to think what’s coming next…