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Melbourne households could soon find their rubbish bin collections cut in half, with councils being urged to move to fortnightly pickups in what would be a major shake-up to the existing system.

Councils are reportedly open to the idea of scaling back collection services, with some already starting consultations with their ratepayers about the possible change, shares Yahoo 7.

With food scraps making up roughly one third of the 878,000 tonnes of Melbourne rubbish taken to landfill last year, the Metropolitan Waste and Resource Recovery Group are now suggesting food and garden waste be collected in a separate bin each week and converted to compost.

As well as cutting back council rates, the report suggested that the collection overhaul would encourage higher levels of recycling among households.

A discussion on Sunrise Facebook page has attracted over a thousand comments.

“How does that reduce household waste? Means we’ll see an eyesore of overflowing bins on the streets now.”

“No bloody way. My general rubbish bin in always overflowing having a toddler in nappies and 2 indoor cats theres no way id leave it for fortnightly collection.”

“Some people fill their bins in a week now, nobody wants rubbish sitting around inside their house for the cat or dog to get into. Silly idea.”

“What a ridiculous thought. I barely make it with once week due to council changing my larger bin to a smaller one and i put all the right waste in the right bins. The suburbs will turn into tips with overflowing rubbish. Stupid idea Council!!!!”

I must say here in Tassie many councils do this already,  and we cope very well. General rubbish is weekly, but the recycling bin is fortnightly.

Would you cope?

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  • I only put one small bag into my household waste bin. I live in QLD and if we were doing fortnightly pick ups I would simply put the waste into the freezer and pull it out on bin day. I would be ok with it as long as the charge on the rates bill was halved also.

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  • I think this is a ridiculous idea.

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  • I am shocked that more councils don’t have green waste bins

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  • We have cut down so much on our rubbish, especially with the recycle program now for bottles

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  • Some households produce excessive amounts of rubbish, so a fortnightly collection would see them either overfilling their bins and rubbish being blown everywhere or keeping it in their houses until the bin was emptied. I know there’s a chance here for people to consider what they are actually throwing away each day but then I think of those with babies and toddlers in nappies. The smell alone is bad enough after a day let alone 2 weeks! I myself only have a 1/2 full bin each week but the nappies…

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  • Our general bin is collected weekly and ours is usually only half full. Recyclable and Green waste bin is collected fortnightly but can’t imagine we would cope with the green waste bin under its current collection if food waste was also included.

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  • Yep, here in tassie, our rubbish is collected fortnightly. Our bins rarely make it to half full, there are only 2 of us at home tho. I think it’s a great idea to have a separate bin for food waste to use as compost. They wouldn’t get mine tho cos I use it as compost myself

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  • We have had them swap our hins, reduce the size and they offered a small deduction in rates, not half.

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  • I bet they wouldn’t cut the rates in half though

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  • I worry about the dog and cat waste that would fester in my bin for a fortnight. Other than that, I don’t have a problem with fortnightly waste collection for general waste. Our bin is rarely over half full and we are four adults. We have much more issue with recycling. Thank goodness the can and bottle recycling was brought in here in nsw so those can be seperated out. Now we can almost always fit all our recycling in the fortnightly bin. Sometimes we have to go bin hunting to find a partly empty recycling bin to take the rest of our recycling. Thankfully there is a block of flats down the street where there are almost always only partially full recycling bins for us to add our overflow to. I wish they would pick up the recycling weekly. We hardly ever put out our green garden bin because there is very little in it most times.

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  • This is ridiculous! We pay these exorbitant amounts for rates and then they want to offer less services? NO way! If this happened in Tassie we’d be up poo creek because our general waste bins are a lot smaller anyway.

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  • Our recycling bins get emptied fortnightly and that works well for us. It’s the rubbish, that smells terrible, that would be a problem if it was not collected weekly. Everyone in our street seems to have overflowing garbage bins on a Friday so I can’t imagine how we would all manage if this went fortnightly.

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  • Our recycle bins have been getting emptied fortnightly ever since we got them. The household rubbish has always been picked up weekly.

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  • Our recycling bins are already collected fortnightly.

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  • As a member of Penrith council in Sydney this has been happening for years,We have three bins,Yellow bin for recycle and fortnight collection,Red bin for general also fortnight collection and a green bin that is for garden waste and food scraps from the home that is collected weekly.We are a family of five (three teenage kid’s) and we cope very well,We see bins put out with lids half open and rubbish hanging out from a two person property,Some people require more education than others.Cheer’s Krusty.

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