Posted By Ron Hunter A quick Google and I can buy a single 240 litre Wheelie bin for less than £40 -free delivery! Your Council will be paying a lot less than that. I suggest you could hit the local press with this, not on the "h&s" tag, but with what (IMHO) seems to be blatant profiteering. "Serving the Community". Indeed! Alternatively, there is an opportunity to undercut their scheme?

Posted By mrs.seed I'm curious to know what would happen if you didn't buy a wheelie bin... From memory, rubbish trucks have quite high backs to them now, so they would be putting quite an extra manual handling risk onto the bin men, to pick up and throw bags into the wagon. Would they refuse to collect the refuge?

Posted By Brenda H They can't refuse (no pun intended!) to collect residential rubbish as it is a statutory requirement. However, having worked in a LA which had its own refuse section, it is fair to say that there isn't normally a lot of room to store anything, let alone vast quantities of wheelie bins. It is also quite alarming how many are vandalised, stolen etc that need replacing, hence having to keep quite a few in stock. They are normally delivered to site in high stacks and are stored like that, therefore making it difficult for just anyone to come and get a new one. Quite often they are stored on commercial sites where they don't just want anyone wondering in to collect them. Bit of a difficult one and maybe they ought to just let people buy from online sources; afterall, if you're making people do something then why limit them to one option?