Bin services in Dublin have been privatised and are no longer provided by the city council.
This has led to much woe, not least of it related to the truly phenomenal amount of dumping of domestic refuse in lanes around the city. Apparently the private contractors are not as willing to continue providing for rubbish collection when the punters do not pay. I happen to know that the city council will provide this service free of charge for 5 years as that is the length of time they continued to collect bins from our tenants while we lived in Brussels – happily collecting the bins while the tenants happily ignored the bills and reminders. When we terminated the lease, said farewell to the tenants and moved back to our house, the city council presented us with a steep bill for rubbish collection for the previous five years and refused to collect our bin until we paid it. Appeals to the (departed) tenants were unavailing and we ended up having to fork out a fortune.
While this did not leave me with any particular affection for the council regime, the move to private providers has been appalling for us. Greyhound, the only bin company which serviced our last house regularly forgot to collect the bins at all. Mr. Waffle had to ring them most weeks. They only began collecting your bins when you had made payments in advance. But they didn’t tell you that. It was shambolic. When we moved house we had the option of another company and we transferred with delight to Oxigen (I don’t know why they spell it that way but please don’t think I can’t spell oxygen) and all has been sweetness and light until today when they did not collect the bin. Mr. Waffle called them. “Oh sorry, you should have got a letter, we are no longer collecting from your area, we have transferred your account and your credit to City Bin.” Call to City Bin follows. They don’t do our area. Oxigen agree to mediate with City Bin to persuade them to cover us. Oxigen will do one last pick up for us. In fact, it looks like there is only one provider who will service our area. Oh excellent, we’re back with Greyhound.
The free market is not doing it for me. Total disclosure requires that I reveal that privatisation of city bin services in Cork has created no problems whatsoever. Cork is perfect, though.
*Only two of these words are relevant to the content of the post. Honestly, could this be more exciting?
I didn’t know you had the mafia in Dublin ?…
Our council still collects the bins but it got rid of the recycling on the grounds that the new ‘EcoDeco’ plant would recycle everything magically out of the rubbish. Then the EU came in and told them that it wasn’t good enough so they’re bringing recycling back (eventually). According to the council man at the community council meeting, they bought the plant off the Italians so they thought it would be okay. I tried pointing out that it’s the *Germans* you want to go for for recycling advice and the Italian’s expertise regarding waste disposal was somewhat different…
Ah, Viviane, if only we reached those levels of efficiency.
Disgruntled, there may be something in what you say..