Jonny McCambridge: Knowing which is the correct bin to leave out for the lorry. I’m rubbish at it

I am asking this question as a rhetorical device to illustrate that I spend a lot of time thinking about the bins (but if you do feel moved to answer feel free to send me a letter, c/o The News Letter).

I’m old enough to remember the old metal bins with the ill-fitting lids which had to be hauled onto the backs of groaning binmen. I also remember the breathless excitement when wheelie bins were first introduced. Along with breakfast TV and seedless grapes, they were great technological advancements which I believed meant that life would never be quite the same again.

Fast forward a few decades and it has all become quite complicated. Now, I have multiple bins of varying colours. If I lived in a different council area, I would have different coloured bins.

As it stands, I have a blue bin for landfill waste (although if I lived elsewhere this would be black). I have a green bin for plastic waste (although if I lived elsewhere this would be blue). I have a brown bin for compostable waste (although if I lived elsewhere this would be green). Following me so far? Confusingly, there is no bin at all for glass, which means I have to collect bottles in a box in the corner of the kitchen.

Despite this, my problem with bins is not the colour scheme or the designation. Tragically, there is something about my obsessive personality which quite enjoys the challenge of separating waste and ensuring it goes into the correct receptacle. More than this, I savour torturing my wife and son when they put stuff in the wrong bins. When an empty baked beans can is mistakenly placed in the brown bin I never miss the chance to fall to my knees, rip out handfuls of my hair, beat my chest and tearfully exclaim “Why God? Why?”.

No, my problem emanates from an inability to determine which is the correct bin to be emptied on the proper day. Our bin day is Monday. The order alternates between emptying the blue, green and brown bins. It should be simple. However, despite my fussiness in determining what goes into the bins, I have proven to be rather less adept at remembering which is the proper bin to be emptied.

I have a simple method of getting around this. On Sunday evening, when my neighbours begin to wheel their bins to the end of the driveways, I observe and copy. If they go green, then I go green.

But in winter this proves slightly trickier. The truth is that a green, brown and blue bin all look much the same in the dark. In these instances, I find myself creeping closer to my neighbour’s bins to attempt the determine the colour. Often I end up right next to the bin with my eyes fixed determinedly on it while mumbling “It’s green…I’m sure it’s green...but could it be blue?” I call this bin staring.

The complications become even more acute over holiday periods. At the very time when my bins are bursting with cardboard boxes from Christmas gifts and discarded food packaging, the collection days are changed.

I have a robust but flawed method for solving the overcrowding problem. When the bin gets to capacity, I climb in and try to crush the rubbish down to free some space (to be clear, I only do this with plastics, not the food waste). On one occasion when I climbed inside, I split my trousers. On another, I split the plastic bin. On another I got stuck at the bottom of the bin and had to shout for my wife’s assistance. During the recent holiday period I found a new way to disgrace myself. While I was inside the bin jumping up and down to crush the plastics, it toppled over. I got up bruised and dazed and told nobody what had happened (until now).

The change of collection date is even more problematical. Under normal scheduling my bins would have been emptied on Boxing Day 2022 and January 2nd, 2023. I had no reason to understand that this would not happen. I was awake very early on Christmas Eve with my son, preparing for the big day (I mean Christmas Day, not bin day).

Then I heard the noise of a lorry out on the street. Suddenly I dropped everything and stared at the window in horror.

“What is it daddy?” my son asked, his lip trembling. “It’s the bin lorry!” I answered. “It’s the flipping bin lorry...they’ve come early!”

My bin was overflowing with rubbish. I simply couldn’t miss the lorry. I ran outside in my bare feet, hauling the blue bin behind me as I chased the truck down the road. Eventually I caught it. Later, as I was picking bits of stone out of my feet, I determined that I would not be caught again. If the bin was emptied early on Christmas week, then surely the same thing would happen at New Year. And so, on the following Friday evening I hauled out my bins. I noticed that nobody else in the street had put their bins out early. Malevolently, I giggled to myself “The fools…the poor fools”.

Saturday morning passed and the bins were not emptied. I was a little disconcerted but reassured myself with the thought that I could simply leave the bins out until Monday and it would just look like I was being overly efficient.

On Sunday night nobody else left out their bins. On Monday morning the bins were not emptied. Like the leper forced to hold a bell, my public humiliation was complete. My overflowing bins remained at the end of the driveway, the very visible symbol of my failure. There was nothing else to do but just leave them there in the hope that they will be emptied at some point in 2023.