Safe Speed Forums

Here we are worried about the trackers they're going to put in our cars & we've missed the real master plan - bug our bins!

Link to Mail on Sunday

Electronic spy 'bugs' have been secretly planted in hundreds of thousands of household wheelie bins.

The gadgets - mostly installed by companies based in Germany - transmit information about the contents of the bins to a central database which then keeps records on the waste disposal habits of each individual address.

Already some 500,000 bins in council districts across England have been fitted with the bugs - with nearly all areas expected to follow suit within the next couple of years. ....

Don’t laugh - I could see this coming.
Whilst out and about in Munich not too long ago, I couldn’t help but notice there were padlocks on people’s wheelie bins. At first I laughed as I thought ‘who would want to stop people stealing their rubbish?’. I couldn’t figure it out so I asked my German friend: “we are charged for the amount we throw away, the locks are there to stop people dumping their rubbish into other peoples bins”. Sad but true!

When I was in Woking a couple of months back I noticed that the wheely bins were barcoded and scanned by the bin men on collection!

Who are you going to vote for come election time to stop this sinister nonsense from proliferating??

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

The really stupid thing about this is I can't see how they will be able to claim it's helping the environment. Once rubbish is in a house, it has to go out somehow - so it either goes in the bin or in a quiet layby somewhere.

If they were really interested then they would spend the money developing more bio-degradable packaging.

It couldn't possibly be just another tax could it Maybe to fund the "rubbish police"

If only Government were properly accountable & we could see how much of our tax is actually wasted on stupid OTT schemes like this I think we'd all be horrified.

Quite!

I dont go out and buy stuff so that I can then go on to put it in my bin!!

I Buy stuff that I want and find that I also get all this other stuff that I *dont* want as part of the package!

It is NOT the householders who are generating the rubbish!

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

I find most Germans to be very considerate and responsible. They are happy to recycle whenever possible, so the principle of being charged for un-recyclable waste isn’t such a concern for them.
We English are a completely different culture. A lot of our rubbish is already recyclable but many of us simply don’t give a sh*t. Perhaps we need a stick (but no carrot?) approach to help us do the right thing? This could even lead to all packagers using recyclable material by public demand.
However, all this could of course backfire and we could end up seeing an explosion of impromptu mini landfill sites.

There's allot more in the actual paper than online.



I was also reported in another paper that approx 10,000,000 people now want to leave the UK. I wonder why?

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

Exactly. The idle people of this country would sooner sit on their arses dreaming up excuses for not recycling than actually getting on and doing it.

The speed at which the recycling wheelie-bins outside our small apartment building fill up each week suggests that, if recycling is made as easy as taking out the bin bags (as opposed to us being expected to individually cart the recyclables halfway across town to the nearest recycling point) then at least some parts of the nation are a bit less useless than you seem to think...

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Chris

Yeah, heaven forbid that we might be expected to do something for the good of society. Sheesh - stupid me

I'm between the cracks on this one.

Our council provides fortnightly collection of "special" rubbisdh segregasted by the residents. We make use of this putting out garden sacks (reuseable - charged for by the council I think some long time ago). During the winter, hardly ever used; during the summer we make a lot of use, often putting out four full sacks. Recently a rule of "no more than two sacks" came in to play. What now? We burn it of course!

Indeed, and if people's bins are bugged there will be a vast increase in fly-tipping. Does nobody in government ever consider the potential unintended consequences of policies?

Another bad idea in refuse policy is moving to two-weekly collections, thus leaving uneaten food potentially festering for up to 14 days

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Yep. The Germans would go and find their nearest recycling centre.
The British would just dump it somewhere.
My god we are brilliant aren't we?

Wonder why the Germans can trust their people to drive on unlimited motorways and we can't?

Would have been a good question if you'd used "don't" instead of "can't"

I find it difficult to understand why people go to the bother of driving to somewhere in order to fly tip yet don't use the same effort to go to the dump... Although, admittedly, many councils seem to go out of their way in order to make dumps difficult and inconvenient to use... However, I for one, and I guess many others, expect to have my refuse and recycling collected - I pay enough bloody Council Tax!

Anyone know what the Germans pay in terms of their equivalent of Council Tax - assuming that they have one?

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

Can you qualify this, or is this just more clucking noises



Supposing you found out your council tax doesn't cover the full cost, would you be prepared to pay more to have it collected?

Not if the cost was as a result of outsourcing to middle men who take a sizeable cut. Outsourcing is fashionable for several reasons, but doesn't really save money in most cases.

Ah, come on Riggy - you live in Telford too...

Look at the opening hours of the T&W's dumps... They're closed outside normal office hours - ie only open when most working people can't get to them and are closed on Sundays and Bank Holidays... If you're unlucky enough only to posess a van for transport, or borrow one so you don't muck-up the inside of your car, they won't let you in as you're "commercial".

And don't get me started on the pathetic excuse we have for a "recycling" scheme!


Yes. But I have a pretty good idea of how much it can actually cost to operate a weekly refuse system - a very good friend of mine is Town Clerk of a similar-sized town in Ireland and I can assure you that their system (for which they have to pay contractors) costs less than 10% of my Council Tax bill per house.

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

I know, thats why I suspected you were flying a kite on this one



They are in fact open on Sundays and Bank Holidays actually, and the one in Halesfield opens until 7pm.



Actually they will. All you have to do is apply for a free permit; they are issued in batches of 10 and when you get down to 3 you can ring up for more.

I'll admit that the fortnightly refuse collection is a bit of a pain, especially in the summer when its hot and you've got waste food in the bin. I just find I need to be a bit more thoughtful about what goes in the bin. I have a sack for plastic bottles, and boxes for cans and glass which, once a month or so, go in the appropriate skips at the dump when I pass on the way to work in the morning. Papers get collected in a red box provided by the council and collected fortnightly. Its not that difficult if we're prepared to a bit of effort in ourselves.

Mark my words (as my mum used to say) if folks don't get a little more pro-active in this recycling lark its going to be forced upon us like it or lump it. Its been done over other issues where inertia in the populace led to regulations being railroaded through and it'll happen over this.