Waste charges- pay by weight

odyssey06 said:

The waste company sector is dysfunctional. Why on earth were they cross-subsidising heavy use customers from low use customers?

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I'm not sure dysfunctional is totally fair, though they may have appeared so recently as they waited to see what the competetion were doing in relation to pay-by-weight. I feel opportunist is more accurate. Most of them have jumped on this opportunity to significantly up their income while avoiding most of the blame or backlash for doing so. Service providers using low use/cost customers to subsidise heavy users is very common.

odyssey06 said:

Are they obliged to provide the service - if they are, that is a public service obligation (PSO). If they are not, why weren't they just cherry picking low use customers via their pricing structure and pocketing the profits instead of using it to subsidisee other customers?

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They're licensed to provide service to an area as defined by the local authorities.

thedaddyman said:

This more or less sums it all up

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The difficulty WW are now having is that their parodies on topical news items are being overtaken by the antics of the "Balklymagash County Council" who appear to have taken over the running of the country while we were all away at the Euros. Ministers appear to be competing with each other for the annual "Foot in mouth award" and in driving forward a level of incompetency which never ceases to amaze me! As my granny used to say "thanks be to God I'm on my way out"!!

I moved from Leixlip to Dublin 14 a few months ago and just received my first Panda Waste bill. My bills have more than doubled (170 for three months) and now equate to my car tax!

Panda waste charge per weight AND per lift. I phoned to query the bill and was told 'we have always charged per weight in your area'.

So this area is a cash cow for Panda seemingly. Annoying as this is, I am more frustrated by the fact that they charge per weight and per lift. Is this allowed?

aoifeh said:

So this area is a cash cow for Panda seemingly. Annoying as this is, I am more frustrated by the fact that they charge per weight and per lift. Is this allowed?

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Yes, it is. I presume there are other operators in that area, did you shop around before signing up to Panda?

Greenstar are the only other provider servicing our road and they charge per weight and per lift too.

After all the furore around this died down, my provider delivered a brown compost bin. It's been fascinating to watch as a result of that how little actually now goes into my normal waste bin ( the expensive one) and how much goes into the cheaper compost bin. Given the fact that my standing charge was being reduced by my provider, I'm starting to think that there may not be a significant rise in cost for me after all as a result of this. I'm wondering what other people's experience is?

As you cannot put cooked foodstuffs into the brown bin and as a lot of products aren't recyclable, we still 3/4's fill 1 black bag every week (2 adults + 4 young kids). The nappies go straight into the black bin itself each day and thats what fills our bin.
Our brown bin is 95% garden cuttings, 5% raw veg cuttings.

Delboy said:

As you cannot put cooked foodstuffs into the brown bin and as a lot of products aren't recyclable, we still 3/4's fill 1 black bag every week (2 adults + 4 young kids). The nappies go straight into the black bin itself each day and thats what fills our bin.
Our brown bin is 95% garden cuttings, 5% raw veg cuttings.

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According to Panda you can put cooked food in the brown bin
https://www.panda.ie/household/what-can-i-put-in-my-bin/brown-bin.html

Yep all foodstuff should go into brown bins. My understanding is that you are advised not to put cooked foodstuff into your own compost bin because it attracts rats but the wheelie bin is ok

Cooked food, hair and tea bags can go into my compost bin

So you can put cooked food in the Brown bin but are 'advised' not to because of attracting rodents.
I think I'll stick with throwing it into the fully sealed Black Bin

Delboy said:

So you can put cooked food in the Brown bin but are 'advised' not to because of attracting rodents.
I think I'll stick with throwing it into the fully sealed Black Bin

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You misunderstand!
You are advised not to put cooked food in a home composter.

Delboy said:

So you can put cooked food in the Brown bin but are 'advised' not to because of attracting rodents.
I think I'll stick with throwing it into the fully sealed Black Bin

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You can get biodegradable bags that you can use in the compost bins.

You need to check with you provider what can go into the brown compost "caddy style" bins and what kind of bags are acceptable to them. Different providers use different digestor technologies. We have had PBW and segregation for many years and our provider used to accept the greensax style bags but they changed their technology and now only accept brown paper bags or newspaper lined bins (so 1950's!). The binmen are trained to reject anything that even looks like a plastic bag. Incidently the reason the old large brown bins were replaced by teeny caddy bins was to discourage garden waste.

Initially I made great savings by strictly segregating, reducing and reusing. Recently because of the Dublin controversy and the government bottling the introduction of PBW the local providers have just jacked up the standing charge by 100% and all the gains have been lost.