This isn't my fabulous eco idea, it is my friend Mary's - so here she is telling you all about it...
We hardly have any rubbish to put in our landfill wheelie bin any more.
A lot can go in our recycling bin, we compost at home and have council collected food waste and garden bins, there's glass recycling round the corner, and our local Co-op takes soft plastics. We also have a thriving 'buy nothing' group and it's always amazing what other people are happy to take off our hands! All of this means that our fortnightly landfill bin usually just has only one carrier bag's worth of stuff in when we put it out on the street.
So it occurred to us that we could repurpose our landfill bin as a public bin!
We live on a residential street, but just round the corner from a garage, and there are quite often crisp packets and similar dropped in our drive or street. Perhaps letting people use our bin would help reduce some of this litter?
To start with we just left our bin on the street - but no one put rubbish in it, and people helpfully put it back on our drive for us instead! We then got some clear stickers to show that we welcomed litter in the bin - as per the pictures. Finally, we cut back some shrubs so that the bin could sit on the very corner of the drive - out of the way of the pavement but very easy to use for anyone walking by.
So far it's been there a week and there's not much litter in it, but there are a couple of sweet packets and scratch cards. Also the reaction from the neighbours has been hugely positive :-) It's early days, but we'll keep an eye out to see if people are using it.
The big win of course will be if other people on busy streets do the same.
As we all already pay for bin collection through council tax, it's an opportunity to increase the number of public bins at no additional expense, except for the cost of a couple of stickers - which are available from here.
Of course it won't be for everyone, or even most people, but if anyone does fancy turning their private bin into a public bin it would be great to hear about it!