Where have you bin?

 

I believe you can judge the affluence of a country by the number of wheelie bins they have. In our area we have three. A green one, an orange one and a black one. 

The bin above is green and it is for garden waste only. Tree  branches, leaves. grass cuttings, that sort of thing. Do not put any potato or carrot peelings in there, or cabbage or cauliflower leaves or other green things from your house like dead old flowers. If you do so it will unleash the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Some authorities have fined repeat offenders for putting cabbage leaves in these bins. Cabbage leaves and other household waste should go in the black bins. 

But not newspapers, magazines, cardboard, plastic bottles like shampoo, soft drinks, yoghurt containers and such like. They go in the orange recyclables bin.

Got it? Green for garden waste. Black for household waste. And orange for recyclable waste. And all three for a waste of time.

These bins are emptied on a rotation period. One week green, then black, and then orange.  

An opportunity for me to play tricks. You need to be a genius to remember which week is which colour. Our bins are emptied on Tuesdays. So on Monday I get out the wrong colour bin, for example green. The neighbours follow suit and get their green bins out. Late on Monday night I go out, bring my green bin in, and put out the appropriate one for that week. The next morning the trash lorry empties my bin because it is the right coloured one and leaves all the other bins untouched. What hilarity!!!

People get very possessive about their bins. They put their house number on them. After all, you would not want someone else to put their trash in your bin whilst it's out in the street awaiting emptying? Would you? So you put the house number on your bin to fend off other peoples' trash. And you would not want someone else's bin on your premises would you? Noooo ... your bin, your trash, your premises.

Another opportunity for me to play tricks. The trash lorry people normally empty your bin and then leave it in front of your house. They don't bother with house numbers. So late on Monday night I go out and very silently move all the bins around. No.1 now has bin number 7 and No.7 has bin number 3 and so on. The next morning the bin men empty the bins and leave them where they found them. And the neighbours get out and find it is not their bin awaiting them; but an impostor from down the road. The hilarity is tremendous, I tell you. I have even done the same trick with doormats. They all have individual doormats and I changed them all round late at night. 

A further individuality about bins is that some people have them cleaned weekly. After the bin men have been, another van comes round and if you have a contract they wash your bin and dry it and put some perfume inside so it smells nice. Now that's affluence for you.

When it comes to trash.  I've bin there and done that!