green waste, brown bin

My ears pricked up when I saw on the East Anglian Daily Times website that Tendring District Council had voted to introduce a brown bin scheme for garden waste.  The round trip to the dump (sorry, recycling centre) takes around eighteen minutes each way, more if I'm caught by the lights at the railway crossing, and it would be a useful saving of time and petrol if the council would come and take my rubbish away for me.

On reading the article I discovered that the service would not be free.  Householders who wanted their garden waste collected would sign up at an annual cost of fifty pounds, and pay twenty-five pounds for the bin.  A council spokesman was quoted as saying that at a pound a week it represented good value.  Since it sounded as though collections would be fortnightly rather than weekly, I preferred to think of it as two pounds per bin load of waste removed.  Which left me wondering how big the bins would be.

The Babergh District blue and black bins at my former place of work were enormous.  I wouldn't grudge paying two pounds to have one of those emptied, since it would hold quite a lot of old compost bags worth of weeds, especially if I left them to wilt and shrink in the bags for a couple of weeks before binning them.  However, since a bin that large full of weeds, maybe with some soil attached, would be difficult to manoeuvre, and certainly too heavy to lift, I didn't think the new council bins would be that large.  Paying fifty pounds a year to have less than half a car's worth of green waste removed once a fortnight scarcely seemed worth it, especially since I sometimes combine my run to the tip with a trip to the garden centre, or go first thing on a frosty morning when I can't do anything else outside.

The scheme is going to be trialled in Clacton first, so the obvious solution is to keep an eye out, and have a look at someone else's bin for size.  Or indeed whether more than one bin will be allowed.  The EADT did not explain what is going to stop people from simply nicking other people's bins, given that they are going to cost twenty-five quid a pop.

Addendum  The green solution would be to get an old bath or similar, and drown all the couch grass, horsetail, sorrel roots and the rest of it for several weeks until they were well and truly dead, then add them to the compost heap at home.  I'm not sure I can face doing that, what with the smell, and wet legs shovelling the drowned weeds from bath to bin, not to mention the risk of a cat drowning too.