The curse of the wheelie bin
Why has urban design never got to grips with the issue of waste disposal from domestic properties?
© Trefor Thompson
The modern wheelie bin - the current domestic waste container of municipal choice – is cumbersome, ugly, made of plastics, voluminous and ubiquitous. It disfigures the highways and byways of cities, towns and villages throughout the UK. On ‘bin day’, this negative impact is vastly magnified, as we all lug our bins out from wherever we have been trying to hide them, onto the street for collection. At this point, they not only look hideous but block our pavements as well. We gather that even Georgian Bath is now littered with them, despite massive public protest.
So what is the history of the waste disposal container?
Let us step back a few centuries and talk of Pompeii, Paris - and Slough. Most histories of the wheelie bin like to start with a mention of a fossilised, wooden ‘wheelie bin’ found in the ruins of Pompeii (79AD). There are also dark hints of prehistoric bin-like cave paintings in the Himalayas. Terroir is not altogether convinced by these references.
So let’s fast-forward to better documented 19th century Paris and Monsieur Eugène Poubelle, academic, politician and a man ahead of his time (no, this isn’t a joke). Here is an extract of an article published in the ‘French Facts’ section of the ‘The Connexion French News and Views’ (https://www.connexionfrance.com/Mag/French-Facts/Dustbins-are-named-after-French-recycling-innovator):
“The [French] word [for] dustbin – poubelle – comes from the man who invented them in France, Eugène Poubelle.
He was the Préfet of the Seine from 1883 to 1896 and responsible for much of the day-to-day running of Paris.
Collecting and getting rid of refuse was a problem and often people simply left it on the streets.
On November 24 1883, he decreed that owners of buildings had to provide not just one, but three wooden containers, lined with metal and with a lid.
One was for compostable material, one for papers and cloth, and one for crockery, glass and oyster shells.
Not only did he come up with the idea of a dustbin, but also recycling.
However, like most innovative ideas, it was not welcomed by Parisians and there was a huge campaign in the press to discredit Poubelle’s scheme.
Firstly, owners did not want to pay for the containers; secondly, the concierges did not want the extra job of taking them onto the street and thirdly, the rag and bone men saw it as a threat to their job.
Rumours were spread that Mr Poubelle was working in collaboration with the container manufacturers and likely to make money out of their sales.”
Nothing new there, then. The article continues:
“On March 7, 1884 Eugène Poubelle issued a second decree ordering the first ever municipal rubbish collections in the city, which were carried out daily by horse and cart.
He also authorised rag and bone men to continue their trade. He had won with his dustbin idea, but accepted defeat on selective sorting and replaced the obligatory three containers by one bin for everything. That idea had to wait until the 1990s to be re-introduced in France.”
What an unsung hero. If you want to see Poubelle and his poubelles, have a look at https://www.lefigaro.fr/histoire/archives/2017/07/12/26010-20170712ARTFIG00265-quand-le-prefet-poubelle-donnait-son-nom-a-la-boite-a-ordures.php
Laying these historic exceptions aside, it seems as though British rubbish was tolerated in the street, the back yard, the outhouse and the privy until well into the 18th century. The population was relatively small and ‘recycle, re-use and repair’ wasn’t a novel concept, it was just what you did. This situation was excellent for scavenging wildlife such as red kites, which thrived in rubbish strewn London, and for pigs, who recycled much of the food waste, before they became food themselves. Scavenging other people’s rubbish heaps was also popular. One family’s waste may well be another family’s economically viable scrap (rags, bones, metal) or fuel (nuggets of coal lurking in the ash).
All this changed with the Public Health Acts of 1848 and 1875, the requirement for each home to have a moveable rubbish bin, and regular collections.
When team Terroir was in its childhood, inside waste disposal containers were still called ‘waste paper baskets’ and outside containers were ‘dustbins’. Such revealing names. Waste paper was still a minor waste issue, which could be easily contained by decorative containers, some of which were made of woven cane or willow. We can also remember that items such as sweet wrappers or screwed up balls of paper, were often just tossed into the open coal grate. Remember those when they were functional and unfashionable?
Dustbins were kept outside, in the back yard or garden if there was one, and were made out of galvanised metal, with two handles and a lid. They made a wonderful noise if you thwacked them with a football, especially if the lid was loose. This aptly named bin contained an awful lot of ashes and dust as well as anything else which had accumulated in the WPB or the kitchen bin. Keen gardeners also ran a compost heap which took all the vegetable kitchen waste. Rural areas might still have a pig. The dustmen called on a weekly basis and came round the back to collect the bin, hefted it onto their shoulders (protected by those iconic donkey jackets) emptied the bin into the dust cart and returned, sometimes, to sling the bin back where it came from.
The move from metal dustbin and donkey jacket, to plastic wheelie bin, high-vis PPE and hydraulic, bin-lifting lorries is really not hard to fathom. As domestic heating changed from coal to electricity, gas and oil, the need for metal bins to cope with the hot ashes, faded away and lighter, plastic dustbins (remember the labelling of ‘no hot ashes’?) were introduced. There was that tricky period when two bins were needed (a foretaste of the future) but finally coal fires were marginalised and the plastic bin reigned supreme.
With an increase in waste volumes (a move to increased consumption, the throw-away society, more packaging, more plastics, less recycling, built in obsolescence, etc etc), bins on shoulders were less attractive and the donkey jacket became history. Residents were expected to bring their bins to kerbside and experiments with lighter black bin bags failed as they regularly ripped and spilled their contents to the delight of rats, gulls and foxes.
It’s the late 1960s and – drum roll – here comes the wheelie bin. Most ‘bin histories’ credit its invention to a Slough based company called Frank Rotherham Mouldings who created the wheelies to move waste from one end of the factory to the other. A waste talent scout (sometimes identified as a Health and Safety Inspector) spotted the potential as a regular replacement for the dustbin and, with the invention of the automated pick-up waste lorry, our urban landscape changed forever.
If only that were the end of it. As we know, the wheelie bin has proliferated, changed shape, got bigger, got smaller, changed colour, lost its wheels, become stackable, acquired a trolley, lost a trolley, is ridiculously noisy where bottles are concerned, is impossible to clean and can only go out on certain days and on certain weeks. You need a computer to run one efficiently and/or a memory for detail which would win you Master Mind. No wonder they are unloved by house holders and residents.
What are the key issues?
Increase in domestic waste: more waste per person and more people; bigger bins seem to encourage more waste, or maybe smaller bins just make us more careful.
Redefining waste: recycling is largely to blame for the proliferation of bins per household. Terroir currently gives garden space to two wheelies (one for general recycling and one for ‘black bin-bag’ waste) and a food caddy; we give house space to a smaller food caddy and a recycled paper box. That’s five different sorts of plastics based bin, differentiated by shape, colour and wheelie-ness. We also have a compost bucket, but that is self-inflicted.
Some households add on one or two bins for gardening arisings such as prunings and grass cuttings. What is waste? What can be recycled? What goes where? What constitutes ‘rigid plastic’ or ‘clean cardboard’ (those wretched pizza boxes)?
Budgets: some bins go weekly, some only fortnightly to save money. Most of us rely on our neighbours to remember which week it is, and just put out what everybody else has lined up. One of these days, it will all go horribly wrong.
Image © Trefor Thompson
Inequality: not everyone has the space for all these contraptions, inside or out. Not everyone feels up to hauling these so called ‘easy-to-manoeuvre’ wheelie bins up and down the steps which may bedevil access to older houses.
Residents in multi occupancy buildings also have to rely on their neighbours to understand and abide by the rules. Bin lid won’t shut? Bin won’t be collected! Everyone suffers for one person’s infringement.
So why do we put up with it? Why hasn’t ‘someone’ designed an effective waste container which shouts of good design, sustainable materials, and smug satisfaction of recycling well managed? My favourite academic paper on this subject, (Bins and the history of waste relations, Heather Chappells & Elizabeth Shove, (https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/esf/bins.htm), argues that ‘the bin is shaped by and shapes contemporary meanings of waste and management strategies’. Definitely time for a change of bin shape.