Just talking rubbish...

According to recent news, Brighton and Hove’s bin men (or, to use the correct term, refuse workers) will be parking up their trucks and putting down black bags as they go on strike across the city from Monday November 9 to Sunday November 15. The strike, organised by the GMB union, is over planned pay adjustments for refuse workers resulting from the council addressing its pay equality issues.

Sigh. Is the Winter of Discontent upon us? There’s nothing worse than piles of rubbish mounting up... I know this for sure. Last winter, I spent time with my two little boys and their grandparents (i.e. my parents) in Northumberland. Morpeth District Council uses a wheelie bin system with collections occurring just once a fortnight. That’s a tad infrequent for my tastes and residents would barely notice a week’s strike. Anyway, during this visit, my family contracted rotavirus (winter stomach bug). Before long, bin bags containing dozens of noxious nappies were stacking up in my folks’ utility room: they wouldn’t fit into the wheelie bins outside and they couldn’t be left in the garden in case animals ripped them apart. I urged my Mum to phone the council and ask for the germ-laden bags to be removed but she “didn’t want to make a fuss”. After two weeks of these bags being stored inside the centrally-heated house, we were all re-infected with rotavirus. As I’m not a microbiologist, I can’t prove that germs incubated by the bin bags were responsible for round two of the bug but they were an obvious culprit. Nasty.

Any way you look at it, rubbish stacking up in a property or public place is not desirable. At my Newhaven home, I’ve missed the Monday morning refuse collection for two weeks in a row. This is because I forgot to place the full refuse sacks, which live on my back patio during the week (adding to the general ‘ambience’ of that area), outside the front door on two consecutive Sunday nights. The task slipped my mind because I’ve recently returned from Spain where we benefitted from communal bins and didn’t need to do a weekly bin bag run. So now, after a call to Lewes District Council, black bags containing nappies, tissues and kitchen gunk are looming at the front of the house in the hope they’ll be picked up by special arrangement, as promised (thus far, they haven't 'bin). Perhaps I should view having my refuse on my property for a fortnight as a ‘practice run’ for any strike?

As well as missing the lifestyle in Spain, I wish I could dispose of my refuse daily. Although recycling boxes aren’t used in Spain, there are many advantages to the Andalusian refuse collection system, which relies on communal bins deployed at regular intervals along each street. Residents simply take their rubbish outside and throw it into the nearest municipal receptacle, which is emptied like clockwork at 5am daily. There’s no need to be surrounded by all that festers and stinks and some of the bins even have their own plaster ‘sheds’ to hide the contents and reduce odour. Furthermore, the refuse workers don’t have a nervous breakdown if householders dispose of a dead Yucca plant or a stone or two along with their household waste. There are't weird health and safety rules in play. And they never leave rubbish in place until the next collection because they are p*ssed off that someone put pieces of wood in a black sack and it could be building waste (this once happened to me when I lived in Rottingdean). The refuse guys in Brighton and Hove do a sterling and challenging job, I’m sure, and it’s one I wouldn’t like to attempt in person, but the underlying system here in Blighty doesn’t seem as civilised as the Spanish one.

The Spanish powers-that-be have the right idea that rubbish shouldn’t be left sitting for long anywhere - and it certainly isn’t stored in people’s houses where it could spread bacteria in the heat of the day. I don’t think I’m talking rubbish when I say that frequently emptied communal bins win the day over English wheelie bins and bin bags stored on people’s premises.

According to Brighton & Hove Council, some communal bins are placed around Brighton and Hove in high density areas, and these are emptied up to seven times a week. However, there are no firm plans to roll this scheme out further, which seems a shame to me. A spokesperson for the council says: “We only rolled them out in the city centre due to high housing density / lack of storage space. That isn’t an issue in other areas.”

If the strike proceeds, Brighton and Hove council is keen to avoid rubbish stacking up, as it did during a recent refuse workers’ walk-out in Leeds. The spokesperson said: “The council has solid plans to manage disruption to core services. However, we remain hopeful that it will not come to that and that we can resume productive discussions with the unions about how we implement fair pay across the council.

“In the meantime, we are not prepared to speculate about what might happen and how we might react. But we’d reiterate that this issue is about how the council fulfils its legal and moral duty to pay employees fairly without passing on unnecessary costs to the council taxpayer.”

If a strike does occur, wrap your household waste up properly in decent quality sacks, guys, and don’t make it an easy target for rats and other animals. I doubt that anyone other than pests will be treasuring your trash.