Before we had Wheelie Bins...

Kermit.de.frog

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

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

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

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

wexie

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

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

Tabnabs

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

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

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

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

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

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

Ken Tucky

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

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

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

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

Mint Sauce

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

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

thebull85

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_

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

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

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

_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

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

Jane1012

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

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/

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

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

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

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

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

It was a horrid time not worth mentioning:)

Badly Drunk Boy

whisky_galore wrote: »

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

mariaalice

A lot of people burned rubbish in a rural area, there is an Irish name for a piece of land on a farm where rubbish was burned cant think of the name off hand.

Edit: The haggard

smurfjed

And we werent told that because the Chinese didn't want our rubbish we needed to start paying for it to be recycled, I find it strange that we are actually shipping garbage to China in the first place, surely the environmental damage done by the fossil fuels outweigh the damage of the garbage!

Where I am now, we have one wheelie bin, everything goes into it and its collected DAILY for free

ayux4rj6zql2ph

This post has been deleted.

aslanroars

I was a bin for the corpo the bins broke ur back. Specially in the rain when there was no bin lids on the bins. U had to tip the bin over to drain the water. And when it snowed it was worse again. Your hands stuck too the bins.

WoollyRedHat

We went on holidays and got rid of our rubbish. When people asked how it was we said it was a tip.

Beanntraigheach

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.

Yeah, the way they treated the Frogs was shocking, but they were even harder on the Krauts and Dagos.

uck51js9zml2yt

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

What a concept...too amazing for our young millennials. Added to that the concept of having to entertain our kids
Without the use of playstations, Xboxes or internet.

What a crazy time we lived in:)

angel eyes 2012

Mint Sauce wrote: »

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.

Yes, I remember my parents giving a tip to the binmen at Christmas and that was it, no further charges. There was definitely less waste and packaging. Now bins cost approx €250 a year and will be getting dearer when pay by weight is introduced.

I'm also convinced that the fossil fuels used to transport the waste around the country, and then on to other countries negates the benefits of recycling. There must be a better way.

whisky_galore

smurfjed wrote: »

And we werent told that because the Chinese didn't want our rubbish we needed to start paying for it to be recycled, I find it strange that we are actually shipping garbage to China in the first place, surely the environmental damage done by the fossil fuels outweigh the damage of the garbage!

Where I am now, we have one wheelie bin, everything goes into it and its collected DAILY for free

I think even the Chinese are fed up of our low grade rubbish, esp when people throw everything from nappies to dogs into recycling bins.

listermint

There was definitely less waste back then.

Poxy capitalism , poxy having to pack everything including a bunch of bananas in plastic bags.

Pox on food retailers they could solve alot of this.

imme

The past is another country, as they say OP.

Check out some 1980's stuff on YouTube, it'll show something of the time.

wexie

whisky_galore wrote: »

I think even the Chinese are fed up of our low grade rubbish, esp when people throw everything from nappies to dogs into recycling bins.

They stopped taking it and apparently there is nowhere else in the world with the capacity to take over plastic recycling on that scale. So as a consequence of that chances are a lot of the stuff we recycle is going to end up in landfill anyways.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chinas-plastic-ban-will-flood-us-trash-180969423/

Stigura

I'm just an old fashioned guy, I guess

_Brian

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:

We had steel bins with lids, then a plastic one in later years.
Bin lorry wouldn’t lift bags and limit of two bins to a house.

wexandproud

wexie wrote: »

They stopped taking it and apparently there is nowhere else in the world with the capacity to take over plastic recycling on that scale. So as a consequence of that chances are a lot of the stuff we recycle is going to end up in landfill anyways.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chinas-plastic-ban-will-flood-us-trash-180969423/

that will mean an end to the cheap plastic krap they send us back

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Stigura wrote: »

I'm just an old fashioned guy, I guess

I keep birdseed and nuts in one.

wexandproud

Axton Beautiful Sortie wrote: »

I keep birdseed and nuts in one.

i'd be more concerned what you do with the sledge and stuff:D

The Crowman

freshpopcorn wrote: »

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

I thought we were the only ones to do that.

Keyzer

Back in the day there was a 'man' for nearly everything:

Coalman - brought lumps of black rocks to you to burn and stave of freezing to death
Milkman - brought you cow juice and other such produce to feed your offspring
Insurance Man - took money from you for insurance purposes and got robbed at the end of his rounds every week
Window Cleaner - cleaned your windows if you so wished
Ice Cream man - seller of ice creams in a clapped out van playing ****e songs
Church collection man - took money from sinners who wished to repent by bribing God

My personal favorite was the man who came by every couple of months to sharpen your knives and garden shears. Convinced he was on month long benders ala Richard Harris and dropped by to replenish his Scrumpy Jack fund.

Scrumpy Jack is cider btw. People got fúcked up on it in fields when I was chissler...