Dublin City Council thinks it's great but it is hard to think of an object of greater derision than the brown bin, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
DOES ANYBODY else wonder about the success of the brown bin? Dublin City Council does not seem overly worried about it. In a written reply to inquiries from The Irish Times, Dublin City Council had this to say about the brown bin: "DCC considers it to be reasonably successful to date and there is no reason to discontinue the service."
Hmm. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
When asked how popular the brown bin was with citizens, Dublin City Council replied: “A recent survey conducted on behalf of Dublin City Council with a random sample of householders across the city indicated that 90 per cent of those surveyed were satisfied with the brown bin service provided by Dublin City Council.” Yes, and I am Princess Marie of Romania.
It is hard to think of an object of greater derision than the brown bin. It took an enormous amount of research to come up with a single person who had a good word to say about it. And even this fan of the brown bin appreciates, unlike Dublin City Council, how deeply unpopular it is. “Whenever I’m rinsing out the brown bin passersby stop to commiserate with me and tell me how much they hate it,” she says.
According to Dublin City Council “over 100,000 householders across the city have been provided with a brown bin and kitchen caddy for the collection of household organic waste and garden waste”. Yet of those 100,000 brown bins only an average of 28,000 are lifted per fortnight. As opposed to an average of 74,000 black bins lifted per fortnight. (There was no total figure given for the number of black bins in the Dublin area).
Cynics would suspect this to be an inflated figure. Even taking it at face value, does a figure of slightly over 25 per cent indicate a satisfactory amount of customer usage?
Dublin City Council has worked hard to come up with a solution to the city’s blight of the black bin bag and to start municipal recycling, with varied success.
The black, green and brown bins clutter residential city streets all week. There are those of us who hold them responsible, along with arrogant adult cyclists, for the death of the pavement. And surely the pavement is also part of the environment which is worth preserving.
The brown bin is the chief tool in what is presumably some communal composting project. The brown bin has also been what the city council calls rolled out (bless them) in South County Dublin, Fingal County Council (that is, north Co Dublin), Dún Laoghaire County Council, Limerick City and “in Kildare”.
This all sounds terribly impressive until you remember that last Thursday, the day of the fortnightly collection, there was not a single brown bin visible on our road of some 60 houses.
And the brown bin started so well with a pilot project in September 2006. In 2008, in what Dublin City Council calls “the next phase of the roll out”, you got your shiny new brown bin with a nice square bucket with a handle (the caddy) and written instructions on what to put in it.
The caddy was to be the compost bucket of your kitchen. In addition to all the things you could put on an ordinary compost heap, you could also throw cooked food scraps into the brown bin.
The result, even in cooler weather, was a mess. Flies hovered at the perforations that stud the lower parts of the brown bin, and some citizens spoke of worms. I hope I will not be accused of another “oestrogen-fuelled tirade” when I say that the male householders found this more difficult to deal with than the females. Perhaps women are more tolerant of disorder and decay . Anyway, in several instances that I know of it was the male householder who said that putting kitchen waste in the brown bin Could Not Go On. The bin was then used only for hedge clippings and other garden waste; not weeds as the written instructions had asked us not to include them.
According to Dublin City Council the tonnage of organic waste thus diverted from landfill doubled between 2008 and 2010 (from 8,287 to some 16,000).
All I can say is that even the less hygienic amongst us have all but given up on the brown bin.
This is a system that came out of the National Biodegradable Waste Strategy. According to a spokesman for Dublin City Council, similar schemes are in operation in various areas of continental Europe.
Even the spokesman for Dublin City Council volunteered that the brown bin scheme needed to be accompanied by “more education”. This education seems to be coming a bit late in the day for a municipal scheme that was started three years ago. And it also consists, apparently, of explaining to people who are as stupid as me that we can buy bio-degradable bin bags in Dunnes Stores and use them in our brown bin. Talk about being the last to know. It is the bio-degradable bin bags that are used by our solitary fan of the brown bin. “I hardly use my black bin anymore,” she says.