I worked on the bins in Ayrshire one summer when I found myself at a loose end. It was the last year before they moved to wheelie bins and by Christ it was a hard job. I was 'general labour' and so one day I could be sweeping the street, the next picking up garden refuse and the next again it would be the bins. It was fairly well paid but you earned it - You picked up however many bin bags the householder put out, you ran up gardens to remove full bin bags from the bins and leave a new bag and, when it came to garden refuse you lifted however much was there and that could be an entire hedge from a large garden, a tree that had been chopped up or bags of soil and rubble then there was 'Special Lift' where householders phoned up and requested a collection and they could pretty much leave out the entire contents of a house and have it removed for free. All services were run weekly. This wasn't 19 canteen but 1997. Not long before I left Ayrshire in 2008 they wouldn't take a garden refuse bin that was too full or didn't have enough in it or a domestic wheelie bin where the lid was full enough to have the lid even slightly up above the top. They are now the laziest, most shiftless useless bastards in work, all they have to do is pull a feckin' bin over to the machine and press a button and the wankers still find a reason to not do it, special lifts cost a fortune for even a few items and, where I am now we don't even get a garden refuse collection and, when I needed a lot of junk removed it was much cheaper to have a private company come and do it than to get the council to remove it.
As for the 'recycling' I had a refusal once because one of my neighbours had put a piece of polystyrene in the top of the bin. What I did in that instance was to be 'eco friendly' and burn the whole feckin' lot of rubbish out the back garden - clouds of black smoke. Take that 'eco' tossers! The joke of course is that 'Landfill' is a better way of dealing with non bio-degradeable rubbish than most of the current recycling programs and most of the 'recycling' councils collect is in fact sent to landfill sites where it is buried with a big note made that 'here be stuff to re-cycle when such a time comes along that it's viable and economical to do so'. The world is full of arseholes and most of them seem to be in authority these days!
www.forces.net
Recycling seems to be mostly a big scam anyway 
The real solution is to get the manufacturers/suppliers to use truly recyclable materials, but no its the consumer that is taxed and penalised for something we have little control or influence over 
