A broken communal bin keeps overflowing and has not been regularly emptied, with seagulls and rats adding to the mess.
One resident, Paul David Gould, 61, said that he had repeatedly reported the problem to his ward councillors and to Brighton and Hove City Council, with little success.
Mr Gould said that the bin on the corner of St Michael’s Place and Clifton Hill did not have a lid and was regularly overflowing.
He even contacted his neighbours to urge them to use other bins, crush their boxes and cut food waste to try to minimise the problems with rodents and gulls.
When Mr Gould took a photograph of the overflowing bin on Thursday 4 December, it had been full for a week.
Workers had cleaned up around the bin during the week and it was emptied last Wednesday (10 December).
Mr Gould said: “It’s not the first time, even when there wasn’t a bin strike.
“Regardless of how regularly it should be emptied, I, along with other residents, have reported that the communal bin is (a) overflowing and (b) doesn’t have a lid.”
Labour councillor Tim Rowkins, the council’s cabinet member for environmental services, said: “Our communal bins are emptied regularly but we do appreciate it can be frustrating if individual bins become full before collection.
“In this instance, there has been an issue with the position of the bin impacting our ability to empty it. We are in the process of moving it to make it easier to empty and do appreciate people’s patience.
“We have around 1,250 communal bins across the city and only receive around a dozen reports from residents each week to report full bins.
“While I absolutely understand the frustration residents can feel when faced with a full bin, the team is doing a good job in keeping our communal bins empty and responding promptly when residents let us know a bin is full.
“We encourage residents to report full communal bins directly to the council and, as part of our recent roll-out of real-time in-cab technology, we are looking at ways to make it even easier for residents to do so and for the information to feed directly to crews.”
Today’s weak excuse for not doing the job properly – but still collecting the full council tax from residents ..”….
Let’s have some balance: Councillor Rowkins is clearly far too pre-occupied with the ongoing wood burner crisis, which is currently wiping out large swathes of the local population. Minutiae such as rotting rubbish and rats on the streets is a much lower priority.
I burn my rubbish in the fireplace when the bin is full. Free heat!
Councillor Rowkins is clearly pre-occupied with getting rid of his wood
…….. but remember the food-waste collections and bi-weekly collections are being rolled out so all will be well………….. 😅🤣😂😅🤣😂
Food waste in my area has been pretty good, to be fair – and it’s also not done by the council, which is an important point. I’m not convinced that bi-weekly collection of general waste is the right time yet though.
I’ve noticed several communal recycling bins in the city centre have just vanished altogether, leaving only rubbish and glass bins for residents. Perhaps disappearing communal recycling bins is a tactic the council has adopted – eg having 2 waste communal bins in a street and no recycling means they can do fewer collections as only general waste and glass to collect?
Been waiting two days for our recycle bin to be emptied and it’s overflowing everywhere! AND it’s not broken! It’s just one excuse after the other. We live in a sh*t hole!!!
If you downloaded the council’s fancy app you would have been able to track your bin NOT being collected for consecutive days in “real time”…
Not sure the council realises that they can have all the fancy gadgets and apps they like, but at the end of the day they just need staff and vehicles to empty the bins in the first place.
You’d be surprised how often people park their cars so close to these bins that the trucks cannot pick them up, usually for days on end.
Equally scaffolding and building firms like to turn bins sideways when empty, to park and don’t turn them back when they leave, then clever people fill the bin with waste and wonder why the truck can’t pick it up, that is exactly what’s has happened in the picture above…. Not the councils fault, or the bin mens fault, people don’t use use their brains for some reason.
It’s high time the council started publishing how many sofas they have to pull out of these bins because people cannot be bothered to go to one of the 2 tips…
Do the bin men need specialist traing to push it out and rotate it through 90 degrees?
And to think they want to expand the council boundaries.
No thank you, (BHCC) you can’t even organize your house as it is
The bin is in the wrong position to be emptied by a truck
Would moving it out a bit require a specialist?
Perhaps if that car wasn’t parked so close to the bin it would have been possible to empty it with out damaging the car?
If the car got damaged you’d all be screaming about the council needing to be more careful.