Councils plan to charge people if they throw out too much rubbish – but if you don’t throw out much, you’ll get a discount on your council tax.
What a brilliant idea!
Here’s how it will work. You want to pay less council tax, so you reduce consumption, reuse what you can and recycle the rest. That way, come collection day your bins are nearly empty and you get a nice reduction in your council tax.
Or do you?
*evil cackle*
Not if I leap your garden fence at 3am and shove all my crap in your bin, you don’t!
Bwah hah hah!
Comments
0 responses to “Pay as you throw”
What’s the betting that, when they announce a major crackdown on the “inexplicably” fast-growing fly-tipping problem, any major media outlets think to report that the reason for the fly-tipping problem is that the council are offering people financial incentives to fly-tip?
Don’t be silly: first rule of media is “Incentives never matter” and the second rule is “Problems are created by big business and solved by gov ernment”.
I don’t think it will happen, for exactly the reasons you’ve given. Also, I live in a flat and share a bin with another flat, so I’ll claim that all the rubbish is theirs and the post-it note on the top of the pile is the only rubbish I’ve left all week. “What do you mean my bills are in their rubbish? Not only are they wasteful, but they’ve been stealing my post as well!”
I dunno, I tend to think that the dumber the idea the more likely it is to go ahead. Certainly a lot of councils are already sticking microchips in bins to lay the foundations of the scheme – and homeowners are already taking the chips out and telling the councils to shove ’em up the councillors’ arses.
That’d make for a great opening for a cop show. Someone dumps a body in a bin and an alarm immediately goes off in some bureaucrat’s office. Mind you, these days, you have to wonder who’d be punished the most severely: the murderer, for, you know, murder, or the bin’s owner, for excess waste.
Time to invest in gravity locks plc.
Apparently, like the plastic bag tax, this has actually made a difference in Ireland.
The chips are an excellent idea.
I can swap the chip in my bin with a nearby single, eco-obsessed recycler and I don’t even have to smuggle my binbags into their bin each week.