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Mothra @mander.xyz

If the rubbish/trash/garbage collector misses your bin, can you request them to pick it up again? And how do they know it wasn't you forgetting to put the bins out?

Curious if you have this option where you live and how it works.

So I'm housesitting and the people that live here left their bins about 3/4 full. The collection is fortnightly here in Sydney.

I put the bins out at the right time like every other neighbor, but the next morning all bins were empty, except mine.

I was told to make an online claim to the council, and I did, thinking it would be completely ignored. Their website says that if you put the bins out and they miss collecting, they'll come back and pick it up in two business days. I just entered my name, address and phone and to my surprise, sure enough, after the weekend they came and picked up just my bin. Nobody requested any proof of my claim, they didn't even reply or confirm they were going to do it- they just did it. They also didn't care that my name isn't listed as a resident of the address I gave.

Happy days I guess. But this got me thinking, how do they know the fault is on their side and not mine? How do they prevent people from abusing the system? Do they have dashcams they check to see? Or the number of people asking for collection is so low that they just don't care? Does anyone know?

20 comments

  • Yeah, you can just request it from my council here in Melbourne as well and they'll do it. You can ask for a courtesy collection or say that it was missed.

    Nobody requested any proof of my claim, they didn't even reply or confirm they were going to do it- they just did it.

    Yeah I mean, it would cost them way more to verify that stuff than to just pick the bin up. You've also got to remember that garbage collection is a public health issue, especially in a large city, as well as an environmental one.

    They also didn't care that my name isn't listed as a resident of the address I gave.

    How would they verify that though? There's no such thing* as a "list of residents". They don't have access to things like elector rolls or driver's license databases and even then those wouldn't be fully complete. They have property title records but those don't show all residents and are useless for renters.

    I think you're just surprised by something working by the honour system, because so many things in Aus require you to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt, like Centrelink. But more interactions with the government should be set up like this. We spend way more money trying to catch "doll bludgers" than we get back.

    • You're right that I'm surprised by the honor system, not arguing that. I don't know, I figured they could perhaps cross check automatically with some database such a driver's license but, guess not . What you said makes absolute sense.

    • Same my council out west offers like 1 or 2 extra collections a year? Just request it on their site and done.

    • Where I live, I believe they are contractors appointed by the city

  • I used to be a garbage truck driver.

    You drive the same routes week in, week out. You start to remember individual bins. For some bins, I would notice if they weren't on the street that week. Than I'd get a call from headquarters to pick up that bin and I'd say no, because I know it just wasn't there when I drove past it this morning. Most times I don't remember though. I get a call for a bin I don't remmeber, or maybe its not originaly on my route, and I just have to go pick it up. Its usually not a problem, I just pick it up when I'm in the area, or the end of the day.

    Some people were notorious "late binners" and they'd be on the record. But if you just forget your bjn once, you can likely just call it in and blame it on them. Even if you're honest, they might still come collect it if they're a good service.

    The only other thing we can check is if your bins have an electronic counting of weighing system. Than we can see if the been has been counted or not. That prevents you from trying a double pickup. The weighing system is especially important in summer and spring, when people have too much green garbage and arm of the truck literally can't lift it up. Than we have quantifyable evidence to deny your bin and you'll get a notice for it.

    • Is that weighing system built into the lifting arm on the truck? Does it record automatically, or just beep at you if it’s over limit? Is it adding up everything that goes in so that you have a total load weight when you dump the truck, or do they measure that with a truck scale in and out?

      When everyone is putting out full bins, I imagine the truck fills up earlier than normal and then you need to pause the route at an unusual place to return to base and empty. Is that common, or do you generally make it through the entire thing in one go?

      What’s the strangest thing you saw happen in that job?

      • There's different types of garbage trucks. Frontloaders,backloaders and sideloaders. I drove a sideloaders, which is typical for collecting house bins. My truck had an arm on the side that i controlled with a joystick. Ideally, I wouldn't leave the cabin all day. The arm had a grabber that could grab two bins at a time. The arm itself had a weighing mechanism in it to weigh the bin. Some municipalities also required we'd check if the bins were registered and payd for, so the bin had a chip my arm could scan. That was always a hassle, because you had to grab the bin just right, or else you wouldn't be able to read the chip.

        The big container on the back was interchangeable. It had its own weighing system, but it really depends on what you load, how much weight you can take. For instance a full container for a paper route would weigh much less than a full contauner on a greens route. The weighing was only aan indication. I would know by experience when the container would be almost full. When the container was full, I could go to a change point close to my location. The company would drop a trailer with 3 empty co tainers for me and my colleagues. We could change out our co tainer when we're full and so.eone else woud come pick it up. Usually we'd give them a quick call when the last co tainer was changed, so they wouldn't have to wait for nothing. In a busy season, we would get 2 or 3 change containers. Driving back to headquarters and changing there happened, but only rarely. That could take an hour or more.

        Sometimes we'd have to bring our loads not to headquarters, but to the actual garbage burning facility. Than we'd have to do the classic weigh-in weigh-out.

        One strange thing I remember well is when I rode a backloader for a plastic route. I had a colleague who stood on the back and picked up all the bags of plastic trash on the street and throw it in the back. In the meantime he'd carefully rummage through them all ti look for valuables. He often found toys for his grandkids,never anything really valuable, as far as I know. But it was weird enough for me to remember it.

        Another one was an incident. The sideloader arm I mentioned previously, has a very big and complicated hydrolics system. One day the hydrolics broke. Its a 1 by 1 meter big chest next to the sideloader arm and it just sprung open and started spraying oil everywhere. I didn't know what to do, since I'm not a mechanic, so I didn'tdo anything. I couldn'teven drive a tually,because the whoke truck was freaking out. I was parked right in front of someone's house (was trying to pickup their bin), leaking oild all over their garden. Eventually they had to send in a cleanup crew to dig up the whole garden 2 meter deep to clean out the soil. It was an environmental incident. The occupants of the house didn't notice anything, because they were on vacation. I can only imagine what their home coming was like.

    • I feel somewhat reassured knowing that it's a human making decisions at the end of the chain on the other end. I appreciate your perspective! I'm sure you must have seen your share of stuff while on that job...

      An electric weighing system? I didn't even know that existed on bins

  • If the council is the collector they are just using taxpayer money for the extra trip. They probably won’t care unless you do this repeatedly.

  • No issues requesting a missed pickup here. It can be quite common if they get overloaded, i.e. after a holiday weekend. It’s probably far more costly to do verification on every instance but they may look into it if it becomes a common pattern.

  • My garbage collection misses my trash a couple times a year. They have a service request line and if you contact them through it, they will usually make a special trip to pick it up the next day. (city of 500,000 in Washington State USA)

    Mine gets missed because we use the smallest size bin (its the cheapest option and we recycle and compost more then we trash) and the recycle and compost bins are like 2x the size. So if I don't put the garbage bin as the first thing they see, sometimes it gets missed.

  • Yeah, we call the township here and they'll send the guys out again. They're much better about actually doing that if the entire street was missed though. Once they didn't pick up our trash and only ours and we had to call the next day and get snippy. They came out though.

  • My county does a recycling pickup a trash pick up and a yard waste pick up.

    I have called when my entire street didn’t get trash picked up a couple of times. I can’t think of anytime that only my bin didn’t get picked up.

    I have called a couple of times when my yard waste didn’t get picked up. I suspect people putting yard waste outt is more sparactic so it get skipped.

20 comments