Councillor has bad vibes about new rural bin collection rules

Fife Council is introducing a new rural recycling collection that will see 5,400 households issued with two additional wheeled bins and told to leave their rubbish at their road ends.

The move is being made to prevent prolonged exposure of refuse collectors to whole-body vibrations from travelling over rough road surfaces, which it is said could cause health problems such as back pain.

It is also aimed at increasing the amount of waste recycled and improving the service to residents.

Homes affected C those with an access road that is poorly surfaced, has potholes, is too narrow or lacks room to turn C will be issued with green and blue bins for plastic, cans and landfill waste, with existing grey bins used for paper and card.

But there are concerns that instead of transporting them back and forth each week, householders will leave bins lying at road ends.

Former councillor Andrew Arbuckle said: I am concerned about the effect on the countryside. There is a strong argument for bin lorries not travelling a mile up a track for a single house but where you have a clutch of houses up a road there could be a dozen bins of each colour. Folk will leave their bins out and it could become quite an eyesore.

The new system, which will be rolled out from the end of May, will affect homes across Fife but predominantly those in the east of the region.

Creich and Flisk have a particularly high proportion of homes accessed by tracks and the chairman of the local community council, Alan Evans, said a number of issues would be posed for residents who remained largely unaware of the change about to be foisted upon them.

He said: Placing a moratorium on bin lorries travelling down access roads with potholes in excess of 25mm in depth seems over-zealous. I suspect that many private access roads are in rather better condition than some local adopted routes, such as those around Balmerino and Gauldry, which have had potholes many times that depth for years.

There are also visual impact issues. It is not uncommon for several homes to share an access road and with up to three different-coloured bins for each home, the resultant multi-coloured clutter in some of Fifes most attractive countryside will result in visual blight.

In the next couple of weeks I would urge householders to study the details of this proposal carefully and assess how it will impact on them and to discuss matters of concern with transportation and environmental services.

Council senior manager for environmental operations Roddy Mann said the scheme would help Fife recycle even more of its waste.

He said: Rural premises have largely been excluded from benefiting from recycling services, as up until now the main changes have been focused on towns and villages. The practice of coloured bins being placed at rural road ends is not a new one across Scotland and is the norm for the majority of rural premises in the central area of Fife.

The road-end collection system also ensures that householders do not have a large refuse collection vehicle taking its toll on private roads. Were now finalising arragements to write to all householders who are currently being considered for the scheme.

Ireland was once one of the poorest countries in Western Europe. Then it went on a tear,Manufactures and supplies chinamosaic equipment. became "The Celtic Tiger,Elpas Readers detect and forward 'Location' and 'State' data from Elpas Active RFID Tags to host besticcard platforms." and was no longer poor at all. How fast did the average Irish resident prosper? The gross domestic product per person in Ireland from 1980 until 2011 was roughly $22,500. At the end of the boom in 2008 it was about $45,000.

Good things happened. Irish men and women who had left the country to make their fortunes elsewhere came home. Snazzy new buildings rose alongside Dublin's Georgian row houses. Investment money poured in, justifying to Irish leaders the government's years of heavy education funding. Ireland was hot.

When the world economic crisis began Ireland's economy came crashing to earth, and suffered a recession that pushed banks into failure, left new subdivisions and office buildings half completed, drove unemployment to 15 percent, and sent people fleeing again to places like Canada and Australia.

Unemployment is ticking down slowly. A recent sale of Irish debt did not see investors demanding the heavy risk premiums charged the governments of Greece, Italy and Spain. The rate of homeowners losing houses and businesses failing has slowed. Is the worst over? Even with all the losses of recent years Ireland is still richer than it was in the early years of this century, but when deciding how they're doing, the average person doesn't pull out a calculator. He or she thinks about this month's bills,Our RFID solutions support a broad range of indoortracking and labels. and how much is left over.

At the Dundrum Town Centre shopping mall just outside Dublin it was easy to look at the concourses packed with shoppers on a St. Patrick's Day national holiday and wonder, "What crisis?" But a quick check with those same shoppers showed a sobriety created by bad times. One woman told me she hoped better times were coming, and quickly added that the years of economic distress had made her wary, and she saw her shopping differently. She would now pay cash and wait to make purchases instead of whipping out the credit card.

An employee of the National Health Service taking his son to the movies said government work had not insulated his home from setback.Find the best luggagetag for you . He had suffered wage cuts, but held on to his job. He knew others that hadn't been so lucky. He told me the Irish were a pretty resilient bunch, but sadly noted that once again the country was exporting bright, skilled, young people.

Another man relaxed with a coffee while feeding his 9-month-old daughter who lay contented in a stroller. His home had lost something in the range of 40 percent of its value since he bought it, just before the peak of the boom in 2008.We turn your dark into light courtesy of our brilliant sun, solarlamp, solar power generation. There was no question he would continue to pay the mortgage, as the bankruptcy laws made it difficult to do what so many underwater homeowners had done in America: walk away. He figures it's going to be a long time until his house is close to being worth what he paid for it.

Suburban office parks tell a big part of the story: major American corporations like Microsoft, JPMorgan/Chase and Google live in smart new office buildings. Standing nearby is a 10-story building half-finished when the boom went bust, now sprouting rusting rebar, the wind snapping the plastic sheeting once stretched over its empty floors where the windows were meant to be. In Dublin's trendy Temple Bar the streets are lined with smart new restaurants, and storefronts with For Sale and To Let signs.