Our picturesque street puts out 13 bins… the road is littered with trash – it smells & binmen often leave it behind
RESIDENTS have said that their once-clean street is littered with trash that smells as they have to put out 13 bins.
Disgruntled locals in Clifton, Bristol, have blasted the state of their street which is lined by endless bins, bags and boxes.
Bristol has a whopping 13 waste collections, more than any other council in the UK.
But it has meant that Clifton residents have had to separate their rubbish into an alarming number of categories.
This includes general refuse, plastic and metal, cardboard, paper and glass, food and garden waste.
John Fillely, a 29-year-old banker, weighed down by recycling told The Times: “It looks awful today.
“If you make one mistake and put a can or jar in the wrong box, they leave it all here.”
John, who is trying to sell his flat, is so ashamed of the “ugly” bins outside his home that he avoids booking viewings on Thursdays.
His neighbour, Joanne Wilson, 49, also slammed the bin system, saying that storage was a “nightmare”.
She said: “We either put them in the basement or in the hallway – but it absolutely stinks in the hallway now.”
Down the street, lawyer John Gray, 53, also lives in a flat, but said “a system has evolved naturally” where whoever is home on a Wednesday night takes the bins out for the whole block.
She added that it is a “problem for elderly people” as one neighbour with dementia struggles to remember which materials go in which bins.
Bristol’s councillor for climate and waste said: “For a decade or more, we’ve been doing the kerbside collection where all the recycling is separated by households.
“It engages the residents in the recycling process because you’ve got to do a little bit more to present your waste.”
According to government statistics, the UK recycles 44.1 per cent of all waste produced by households, including recyclables and landfill items.
Bristol is the only big English city that achieves above the average – recycling 46 per cent of household waste.
In September, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak scrapped a proposed edict forcing people to sort rubbish into seven different bins.
Laws would be introduced to prevent “an excessive number of bins” on the kerbside, the government later added.
However, evidence has shown that areas with more bins have a better recycling rate.
Areas with two bins — refuse and mixed recycling — recycle 40 per cent on average, while those with seven recycle 58 per cent.
Councils in England currently choose how and when to collect waste in their areas.
But the Government last year passed a new law forcing through a consistent rule on bin collections.
From March 2026, all councils will be required to recycle the same materials and have a standard of three bins: refuse, mixed recycling, and food, it said.
The Environment Act also requires food waste to be collected once a week.
The rate of recycling across the UK has shown little progress in recent years.
In England it’s remained around the 45 per cent mark since 2015.
The UK government has committed to meet a 65 per cent recycling rate by 2035.