Before we had Wheelie Bins...

Kermit.de.frog · 03-07-2018 3:38pm #1

The thread on waste fines got me thinking...

There was a time I am told when we had no wheelie bins in Ireland. I'm too young to know/ remember.

So all the rubbish was just dumped in bags on the street to be collected??

Can only imagine what that must have been like in weather like this.

How did you keep the birds away from pecking at the bags?

The 80's must have been a dark, dark place in Ireland. Be interested to hear how people lived then compared to now and your refecltions :cool:

odyssey06 · 03-07-2018 3:41pm

It was a lawless time. There was no internet. Kids were bored and the environment was just the name for a government department.

They would keep the birds away from the bin bags with catapults and nobody would bat an eyelid.

You don't want to know what they would do to a frog if they caught one.

wexie · 03-07-2018 3:41pm

Don't know about Ireland but used to have to do this in Canada, we had a big wooden box with chicken wire on the front to put the bags on, lid to close it and a big brick to go on top to keep the trash pandas out.

I'd imagine foxes might have been much the same here.

freshpopcorn · 03-07-2018 3:41pm

A metal barrel and a match in the back garden was very common!

wexie · 03-07-2018 3:43pm

freshpopcorn wrote: »

A metal barrel and a match in the back garden was very common!

still is!!

Was watching neighbour burn his rubbish (again) last night hoping no sparks would set fire to everything else :mad:

verycool · 03-07-2018 3:43pm

Tell you one thing, I don't miss the smell.

Tabnabs · 03-07-2018 3:44pm

WTF, there were bins, hence why Binmen aren't a new invention. The bins were smaller, you dragged it to the kerb and the council collected it.

Fcuking millennials...

Graces7 · 03-07-2018 3:44pm

In the UK we had metal bins provided by the council.... VERY civilised!

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1 · 03-07-2018 3:45pm

Metal dustbins and then the new fangled black bins. Everything went in without being put in to bags. They were filthy and foul smelling. Some people put food waste in to smaller metal bins which the 'slop man' collected each week to feed pigs. Generally there was much less waste and these dust bins were very small compared to wheelie bins.

thebull85 · 03-07-2018 3:46pm

Kermit.de.frog wrote: »

The thread on waste fines got me thinking...

There was a time I am told when we had no wheelie bins in Ireland. I'm too young to know/ remember.

So all the rubbish was just dumped in bags on the street to be collected??

Can only imagine what that must have been like in weather like this.

How did you keep the birds away from pecking at the bags?

The 80's must have been a dark, dark place in Ireland. Be interested to hear how people lived then compared to now and your refecltions :cool:

The practice of leaving your bin bags out for collection was happening well into the 90s, it wasnt that dark at all to be fair.

garv123 · 03-07-2018 3:47pm

They were just called bins. wheelie bins without wheels.. Plastic or tin.

Some of the fancy folk had metal clips to keep the lid on, middle class had bungee cord, us peasants sat a big stone on the lid to keep it in place

80-litre-plastic-bin-with-clip-on-lid-p130-9885_medium.jpg

80-litre-plastic-bin-with-clip-on-lid-p130-9885_medium.jpg

Ken Tucky · 03-07-2018 3:48pm

wexie wrote: »

still is!!

Was watching neighbour burn his rubbish (again) last night hoping no sparks would set fire to everything else :mad:

Thats sick....worth reporting too. I have a neighbor who burns rubbish in his fire.

Everyone on the road closes their windows as the smoke stinks and doesn't seem to rise. Never see a bin outside the house either.

Sickens me,

Mint Sauce · 03-07-2018 3:48pm

We just had bins, where the bin men picked them up.

Unfortunately, electricity and the combustion engine was yet to be invented, so they had to carry them to landfill, in darkness.

threetrees · 03-07-2018 3:49pm

We had bins that were lifted by hand and emptied into the bin lorry. The trick was to retrieve your bin lid before it was knicked or blown away.

whisky_galore · 03-07-2018 3:49pm

Old metal bins, like the one Oscar the Grouch lives in.

Mint Sauce · 03-07-2018 3:51pm

whisky_galore wrote: »

Old metal bins, like the one Oscar the Grouch lives in.

Ah come on, the OP is not going to know who he is.

odyssey06 · 03-07-2018 3:52pm

Aren't there still tagged bag collections in parts of Dublin today?

thebull85 · 03-07-2018 3:53pm

Ken Tucky wrote: »

Thats sick....worth reporting too. I have a neighbor who burns rubbish in his fire.

Everyone on the road closes their windows as the smoke stinks and doesn't seem to rise. Never see a bin outside the house either.

Sickens me,

Maybe they cant afford to pay for collections.

_Kaiser_ · 03-07-2018 3:54pm

odyssey06 wrote: »

Aren't there still tagged bag collections in parts of Dublin today?

Back in the day there weren't even tags :eek: - and yet the bins still got collected anyway.

gifted · 03-07-2018 3:57pm

garv123 wrote: »

They were just called bins. wheelie bins without wheels.. Plastic or tin.

Some of the fancy folk had metal clips to keep the lid on, middle class had bungee cord, us peasants sat a big stone on the lid to keep it in place

Bloody hard work getting a mattress into that

js35 · 03-07-2018 3:59pm

odyssey06 wrote: »

It was a lawless time. There was no internet. Kids were bored and the environment was just the name for a government department.

They would keep the birds away from the bin bags with catapults and nobody would bat an eyelid.

You don't want to know what they would do to a frog if they caught one.

Oh yeah frogs and a straw :pac: :pac: just remembering that now

Mint Sauce · 03-07-2018 4:00pm

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

Back in the day there weren't even tags :eek: - and yet the bins still got collected anyway.

Because it was a council service, before it was privatised to the highest bidders, and it became a for profit service.

It's the kind of thing our property tax should be for.

Boom_Bap · 03-07-2018 4:02pm

There was alot less packaging back then as well and there was less of a throwaway culture.

Jane1012 · 03-07-2018 4:05pm

Kermit.de.frog wrote: »

The thread on waste fines got me thinking...

There was a time I am told when we had no wheelie bins in Ireland. I'm too young to know/ remember.

So all the rubbish was just dumped in bags on the street to be collected??

Can only imagine what that must have been like in weather like this.

How did you keep the birds away from pecking at the bags?

The 80's must have been a dark, dark place in Ireland. Be interested to hear how people lived then compared to now and your refecltions :cool:

I'm 29 and I can remember a time when it was just black bags, I was probably about 10 when we first had wheelie bins.. so that was around 1999 and I'm in Dublin....

Kermit.de.frog · 03-07-2018 4:09pm

Jane1012 wrote: »

I'm 29 and I can remember a time when it was just black bags, I was probably about 10 when we first had wheelie bins.. so that was around 1999 and I'm in Dublin....

I do remember the bins described and the odd black bag thrown on top. Don't recall all black bags.

I figured we would need to go back to the 80's for that sort of savagery.

It's fascinating though all the stuff they did not have yet got by. (in fairness easier not to miss something when you have never had it)

w/s/p/c/ · 03-07-2018 4:10pm

odyssey06 wrote: »

Aren't there still tagged bag collections in parts of Dublin today?

Correct. Terraced houses in Dublin 7 still have tagged bags. No front or back garden means no room for wheelie bins.

seamus · 03-07-2018 4:15pm

Yeah, my first memory are old battered metal bins that had razor sharp edges where they'd been damaged. Most people kept them in the side entrance or out the back, throw the black sack into into it, bring it out on bin day, which was once a week.

If you had a family, you probably had two bins to hold all your waste, and at busy times like Xmas even that wasn't enough. When bin day came around there was just a big pile of black sacks outside your house.

Speaking of Xmas, the binmen would come around begging the week before looking for their Xmas bonus, and if you didn't hand it over, your bin collection could be hit and miss for a couple of weeks.

Absolutely everything went in. Paper, cardboard, glass, food, nothing was separated. Except milk bottles, you left them out for the milkman to collect.

There was a dump up the road where you brought big stuff like tellies and mattresses. Just a big hole in the ground that everything got lashing into.

Absolute madness when you think about it.

The first attempt at recycling in Dublin was these green "bins". It was basically a plastic box about twice the size of a banker's box, and you threw in mostly paper and cardboard. Lots of stuff couldn't go in it. You put the stuff in and then put it outside for collection.

That went on for a couple of years, but was fairly roundly criticised as being little more than a weak attempt to appear environmentally friendly. You couldn't put loads of things in it, there was no real incentive to use it (loads didn't), and the cost to the state of collecting it was massive, especially since at the time there was basically no money in selling on recycling waste. They abandoned that then and we were back to throwing everything in the black bin until the mid-2000s.

uch · 03-07-2018 4:18pm

I was a Council Binman in 1992, there were a hell of a lot of regulations about what could and couldn't be put in the bin, but most Binmen didn't give a shíte and collected anything for an odd bottle of Guinness or the likes, but if you were a moany/narky cnut, you would be in trouble and your bin might have been forgotten to be lifted

Lucena · 03-07-2018 4:24pm

Ken Tucky wrote: »

Thats sick....worth reporting too. I have a neighbor who burns rubbish in his fire.

Everyone on the road closes their windows as the smoke stinks and doesn't seem to rise. Never see a bin outside the house either.

Sickens me,

Fairly common, I'd imagine.

I rented a house down in Cork a couple of years back. Inside there was a little folder with all sorts of practical information: how to work the heating/immersion, opening times of local shops etc. And also how to deal with the rubbish.

It said to take it out the back and burn it! Written in black and white! I found this very very strange, I mean, what sort of image does this give to foreign tourists?

The guy that rented to us rang after a couple of days to see if everything was ok. So I said to him, "everything's grand, I just have a question about the rubbish", expecting him to be a bit embarassed about what was written in the folder. Not a bit of it! "Yeah, just throw it out the back and burn it", no hesitation, no embarassement, nothing.:eek:

I didn't do it, but I had to waste an hour of my precious holiday time bringing the rubbish to the local recycling centre, pay 8 euros or whatever.

I live in France, where rubbish is collected. When I see this kind of sh1te going on in Ireland, it just proves that behind all the money and post-Celtic Tiger "we're a grown-up country now", Ireland is still very backward in a lot of ways.

topper75 · 03-07-2018 4:42pm

whisky_galore wrote: »

Old metal bins, like the one Oscar the Grouch lives in.

To this very day ... the only TV character I ever identified with. Guy spoke nothing but sense.

Wheeliebin30 · 03-07-2018 4:45pm

It was a horrid time not worth mentioning:)

Before we had Wheelie Bins...

Comments