Oh yes. Which council is madderer?
Ours this year are charging an extra £40 to take the blue recycling bin or they will not take it and you need to go to the tip or the public ones ... One of my bestest friends is councillor for Allestree I have been playing hell and she says it is the labour council... 
Almost as bad as the workplace parking levy I have to pay to your council ....
Oooop 'ere we have a blue box a blue bin and a black bin. They used to be collected weekly now they are collected on alternative weeks. There used to be a green sack collection too, you could collect green sacks from pick up points put garden waste in them phone the council and they would collect them on the next green sack collection.
We now have to pay for the collection of any green sacks.
The blue box and bin are interchangeable paper and cardboard in one plastic/glass bottles and cans in the other when I say interchangeable ours aren't, the bin is always full of glass bottles. 
Woe betide you if you put the wrong plastics/cardboard/paper whatever in the bin, you are shamed in public, a large bright orange 'tag' is attached to the handle of the offending bin alerting all and sundry to the fact that you have erred, (not in the speech impediment sense of the word you understand).
Then we have the jolly old black bin, the lid of said bin is not allowed to be open, orange tagging being the result, often times if the lid is open the bin not only gets tagged but it is not emptied. 
The opening times of the local tip have been cut resulting in long queues of traffic forming on the main road into Sheffield. Van owners have to apply to the council to get a book of tickets to use the site 10 visits per year are allowed.
The surrounding highways and byways are now awash with black sacks, sofas, fridges, you name it and it is out there.
All of this because the Tories are forcing the council (Labour) to make a 3% cut in their budget. In the public sector any company worth it's salt would be able to absorb 3% cut just by altering it's stationary budget. 
Apparently there are some riots going on in Birmingham maybe this is the beginning of UK's civil unrest. Following on from the 'Arab spring maybe we are having an 'English summer'. 
Do you remember the days when we had metal bins you put rubbish in and they came round once a week to collect the bin from your house empty it and put it back ... You had a bonfire in the garden for your garden waste , made compost with your tater peelings etc. Newspaper was used for windows and rolled tight and knotted for lighting your fire .. You took bottles back to the shop and got some money in return or put them out for the milkman ... The binmen came at Christmas for a tip you were glad to give mostly .... 
Now Black bin general , Brown Bin garden, Blue bin bottles and plastics, Blue bag for newspapers , Orange bag for cardboard and we do the sorting, no bonfires allowed in the garden, no open fires cause no chimblies , smokeless zones anyhoo, we have to take the bins as Miss C says alternate weeks , to the end of the drive and collect again.. If you are away you have to wait four weeks before it is emptied, which in summer is rancid... 
Then on top of that the metal bins when the got dirty you could set fire to them to clean and sterilise them. These plastic things you need to pay a little man to do it for you £2 a time doesn't sound a lot but it mounts up.. Why don't she do it herself you think ... If you have a jet wash fine.... BUT we don't when we first had them I tried to clean one and promptly ended up head first in the thing legs and feet only seen out the top unable to move... daughter rolling on ground me laughing hysterically in bin.... Daughter had to fetch neighbour in the end to tip the bin over and let me out so 
never again...
Was life simpler years ago or is it just me....... 
Excellent rants both!
The outrageous part of this recycling malarkey is that it is all down to an EU directive which is supposed to address a lack of land-fill sites... The reality being that there are plenty of sites available because we are always digging great big holes in the ground to extract building materials...
...and of course most of your carefully sorted waste is shipped to China where it is dumped in land-fill sites....
