Residents riled as bin bags left uncollected

RESIDENTS of parts of Cornwall where the county council’s new waste collection service has started are trying to get a handle on why their rubbish has not been collected.

- LEE TREWHELA

They have been told it is because they are using seagull-proof sacks with the wrong-coloured handles – black, rather than white.

A number of locals have accused Cornwall Council of wasting money and are annoyed by the irony that the black-handled refuse sacks they have been using up until now will have to go into the white-handled bags with the rest of their black bag landfill rubbish – as they cannot be recycled. The council argues that a new standardised service will be much more effective and will encourage recycling.

Gary Miller wrote to CornwallLive asking: “I wonder if you are aware of the amount of people who had been refused their bin collection because the seagull-proof bags have ‘the wrong colour handles’? My collection was refused today and upon asking the collection team why they were not taking my rubbish, their answer was that the bag doesn’t have white handles.

“This is a bag that was purchased from the Cornwall Council one stop shop less than a year ago. We were not given an option to have a new bag when the new bins were delivered and there has been no mention of this relayed to my property. I have noticed today that this has been the case in many towns across Cornwall where the new bin collection scheme is in place; Facebook appears to have a lot of such incidents mentioned.”