The council has confirmed, again, that bin collection takes place every Monday morning, a fact it describes as “a matter of public record and has been since 2015.” The confusion, it concedes, lies entirely with which bin is due on which Monday, general waste and recycling alternating fortnightly on a cycle nobody now living can accurately recite.
The system is governed by a colour-coded calendar, mailed to every household in December, which the council itself concedes “does not tend to survive contact with a fridge door beyond roughly March.” Residents are directed to an online lookup tool in its place, which as of Tuesday had been down for six weeks for “scheduled maintenance,” a phrase the council was unable to put a date on.
“I've had three different apps, a note on the actual bin, and a standing arrangement where I text my neighbour and she texts me back, and I still get it wrong about a third of the time,” said one resident. “At this point I just put both bins out and let the collectors sort it out. I understand that's technically not allowed. I no longer care.”
A leaked internal memo, seen by this newspaper, suggests council staff are not exempt from the confusion: three separate employees are recorded asking a colleague, in the same week, which week it currently was. The colleague's reply, in full, reads: “Honestly mate no idea, I just do both.”
“We appreciate this causes a certain amount of what residents have described to us as spiritual exhaustion,” said a council spokesperson. “We'd point out the day itself has not changed once in eleven years. We think that's actually a real point of stability people should be drawing more comfort from.”
A dedicated bins hotline has received forty-one calls this month, of which thirty-eight were the single question “which one is this week,” a statistic the council described, with what it called cautious optimism, as “at least a consistent question.”