Yes, you do need to contact the Council and details of how to do so should have been on the correspondence re the date the wheelie will be delivered (I think). The Council say, though, that if you opt out of having a wheelie then your black-bagged rubbish will not be collected and that you will have to make alternative arrangements.
Small frontages, the fact that the wheelie makes it impossible to make anything pleasant or useful of your limited frontage and the fact that you are a small in number household and recycle thereby producing very little waste are all non-reasons for letting you off the hook. We have been through this ad nauseum in Brentford. To add insult to injury, if you do 'house' the wheelie as I have to date and place your 20L of household waste in the bin only on the morning of collection, you are housing the 140L bin for 365 days a year for the rubbish to stay in situ for all of half an hour per collection day. The men then merrily pick the bag out of the bin (which I knew they would do and which they are expressly not supposed to do - 'health and safety') and I don't blame them for doing this one bit. The whole thing is a total nonsense for those in households such as those described above.
Further, to my disgust, when I visited a student at some Council flats in Hounslow earlier this week, both rubbish areas were completely full to overflowing with rubbish also all over the ground and on the communal lawned areas and items such as mattresses were also abandoned there. No doubt this will all be nicely cleaned by the Council by the time of my next visit. There was not, by the way, sign of any recycling facilities. How the imposition of wheelie bins on people who already do the right thing is supposed to increase the recycling rate I really don't know and when I see the situation just described, it really does make me rather cross. |