Is your bin bugged?

Good on 'em!
If local authorities are to meet obligations for recycling, then at some stage the people that refuse to participate are going to have to learn. I mean how difficult is it to put the KFC wrappers in the green bin, not the black bin? Well, you are what you eat, and the greasy-chicken-head-people are struggling. A little bit of RFID technology will help them along, into the world of clean, non-smelly bins, don't you think?
I don't recycle everything but I do try, unlike some people that I know. Failure to recycle is anti-social, if not grounds for eviction. I don't think we need to be encouraging people to rip out their bin's RFID tag, unless there is some post-Orwellian microphone/camera/sniffer built in there, because the motivation for this is clean. The bins belong to the local authority so ripping out the bug is a crime. Besides, can you imagine how difficult a recycling scheme would be to roll out if the bug in the bin had to be explained?
Incidentally, you can get 24 grand for doing the bins these days, and with 'filthy rubbish' only getting collected fortnightly, a job on the bins isn't so bad, particularly if you can be home by lunchtime, albeit after a 5 A.M. start.

So why secretly collect data on rubbish? Why not collect the information openly if its use is as innocent as you claim? The Orwellian practices of national and local government is getting beyond a joke.

Moreover, there is a political agenda, to charge people for collecting rubbish is being suggested by the Institute of Public Policy Research and Local Government Association. Is the data being used for costing your future rubbish collection? Once again New Labour trying to get the rest of us to take responsibility and pay for capitalism problems.

No-one has pointed out is that we are paying for our rubbish collection already, including recycling in our Council Tax payments. It is a spectacular con by the government, IPPR and LGA, getting us to pay twice for what should be met by our Council Tax.

At the same time it should be noted there is no attempt to introduce legislation to limit the packaging on super market goods. Therefore the government expects us to cough-up for the pollution and rubbish big privately run buisness produce, irrespective of the fact we no control over how they package goods, while their share holders live high in the hog and then you Craig come on here all sweet reasonableness and defend this policy - piss off new labour troll!

Why on earth would anyone want to bug a waste bin, it stays at the end of the garden the majority of the time, not many people use their back gardens just to sit next to a flipping bin & have a glass of wine.

You are trying to wind us up surely.

Or do you work for the government & would like to know what conversations we have with our rubbish bin.

Dammit.

Strictly speaking it's not a bug, but at RFID tag which allows the dustcart to identify each bin. The dustcart is also fitted with a weighing system making it simple to charge households for the amount of waste they produce. You could argue that you pay already through the Council Tax, but nevermind, we will always find ways to spend the money. Have you ever heard of local taxes decreasing?

The next stage is more interesting. You can tell a lot about a household from their refuse. Maybe there are more people living there than we know about. Maybe someone is claiming a Council Tax discount or Housing Benefit on the basis of being a sole occupier. Worse, a houshold might be sheltering someone we have excluded from the area for anti social behaviour, or illegal immigrants.

From looking at the items in the refuse (RFID tagging at item level will help) we can determine a lot about your lifestyle. Maybe you drink too much, in which case we can involve the neighbourhood management team to help you address this and your resulting antisocial behaviour. We could also pass this on to the NHS data spine. We can see how you are feeding your children, and again correlate this with any reports of ASB, performance at school and social services and police involvement.

You might be tempted to place your refuse in someone elses wheelie bin to avoid the charge. This will be a serious offence and in persistant cases could be detected by covert surveillance, authorised under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (this already happens for ASB and flytipping investigations). Dumping your refuse in the back alley instead of using your wheelie bin properly is already an offence which can attract a £5000 fine, as is failing to recycle properly.

Many people fail to seperate their recyclables properly, and in a few cases they have been prosecuted and fined. In fact recyclables are better seperated at the civic amenity site (tip to you) and we make a far better job of it that you will (eg we can tell steel cans from aluminium). The trouble is we have got too good, so the prices of scrap glass and waste paper have gone through the floor and the stuff gets landfilled anyway. The reason for making you seperate your waste to to engender a spirit of involvement with the community and to make you feel like you are contributing to saving the environment, when in fact you would do far more good by only using reusable containers, composting and minimising your waste. Plus it gives us an opportunity to punish you when you get it wrong, as invariably we all will.

There will be further benefits when we start sharing the data with our partner Tesco, and they will be able to correlate your waste with your shopping (using credit and loyalty card data), offer you products and services which may be of interest to you, according to your lifestyle and detect and discourage any disloyalty you may show by shopping elsewhere.

The bin and RFID tag belongs to the council not you, despite the fact that we will charge you if you get it nicked or torched, and any damage to the bin or chip will be prosecuted as criminal damage leading to a fine of up to £5000 or six months in the mags court.

Your council - protecting the environment and spending your money wisely. On people like me who are paid £40k plus, despite never having done a days work in our lives. All the people whos work we all depend on, like the dustmen were contracted out to more work and lower pay long ago.

As per usual, the powers that be show the mistrust of the people by assuming we could not take part in some sort of enviromentally friendly way of getting rid of rubbish. Instead of sorting something out - they plant a bug in your bin, assuming like our friend above that anyone eating chicken wings is obviously addled in the brain, unlike the middle class muesli eating well paid servants of the state who maintain a clarity of vision. Supposedly.

The way to arrange rubbish collection is simply to split it up into organic, glass, plastic and things like batteries and, on a bigger scale, electrical goods, which cannot just be thrown into a landfill. At the end of the day, we cannot throw this stuff into a landfill in Wales.

Most of the trouble comes from the producers of goods who feel the need to wrap everything up in plastic. In my town ,we have McDonalds crap all over the place. The council ought to charge 10p per each item picked up. And yes, fine the litter droppers also. I'm sick of seeing parents throw rubbish in front of their children. Raise your kids in such a manner, and you'll be kicking beer bottles and dodging litter in your area one day.

As for bin men on £24,000 a year. Trust me, if we saw that one in the local job center, there would be a line of people begging for a chance.

I'd crawl on the road picking up chewing gum for that price.

OK i heard this 'bug' is a example of what might be done. The plan I read about was to fit wheelie bins with a barcode tag, so that the refuse collectors could carry a barcode reader device, and if someone had put inappropiate materials in their bin (grass cuttings/masonry/recyclable glass) the barcode would be scanned and then a letter sent to the home owner warning them that if it happened again they'd be issued a fixed penalty notice fine through the post.

My concerns with this is rather then it dealing with those intentionally being difficult and not recycling, it will screw over vulnterable adults, blind people, the elderly etc Also, a nasty neighbour might put stuff into your bin, or even inadvertently do it if you have a communal yard area where all the bins are for your block of flats.

Surely it would be better to continue to use council tax to dispose of litter and when people are given community service orders for offences like vandalism/chavish behaviour rather then them paint goalposts or other pointless tasks, they can sort household waste as their community sentence into recycling piles... thus negating the need for charges to fund people to sort it.

Rather then fucking the end user of items yet AGAIN they should be making companies pack goods in biodegradable packaging!

Kerbside waste seperation is not just about recycling though. The amount of waste recycled, either by kerbside separation or at the waste reclaimation centre (again, tip to you) is a function of the cost of landfill and landfill tax and the price of scrap glass, waste paper etc. When it is not economic, the glass bottles you carefully washed out and placed in your green bin go to landfill.

The point of kerbside recycling is that the communities which we manage can feel involved in protecting their environment - even though the landfill is tens of miles away from where they live. By putting your recyclables out only on the third Tuesday after the full moon or whatever we decide you are showing your ability to obey the rules and to be a responsible and social citizen, something we all should be proud to do.

Complex kerbside recycling schemes do not increase the amount of material recycled, but that is not the point. Even in the most compliant areas, waste reclaimation centre separation generates far more recyclable materials. In areas under neighbourhood management it is difficult to get people to put their refuse in any bin, rather than scattering it around the back allies to feed the rats, so you can imagine how charging for refuse by weight will go down.

There is however massive potential for using the information generated by RFID bins, along with RFID tagging at item level to help manage our communities, enforce our rules and improve the lives of those who need our help to avoid petty crime and antisocial behaviour and it would be a shame if this opportunity was lost because of perceived concern about a non existent threat to civil liberties.

I agree totally about reducing packaging at point of sale - the Irish plastic bag tax has been a great success.

Everyone knows recyclying rubbish will save the planet.

Surely all the information that the devices on the bins will collect will also be of use to you and your fascist comrades when you come to power?

For 'fascist comrades', read the 'Tory party' if you're a normal person.

The misguided might suggest that the current government has done far more damage to civil liberties than the previous administration. Of course they are wrong, and the current government has in fact done far more to help me and my colleagues manage your communities and to help you address the tendency towards antisocial behavior which you show by referring to us as 'fascists'. BTW, I work for a labour authority.

I wouldn't have thought that information sharing with central government would be a problem. Central government would need to provide the appropriate regulations but that's not been a problem in the past - for example there are links between Housing Benefit and Council Tax and the Department of Work and Pensions and HMRC. This could attract central government funding - alwats a big plus with the elected members - and provide opportunities for neighbourhood management, ASB, HB and Council Tax fraud and of course central IT teams to expand the scope of their contribution (without empire building of course) to improving the lives of the inhabitants of the communities we lead and manage.

One case brought recently failed because the council involved were unable to prove to the criminal standard of proof that the accused had placed the offending items in her bin. She was guilty of course, but without covert surveillance of her back yard it was impossible to get this into the thick head of the magistrate involved. Hopefully the law will soon allow civil penalties to be awarded, which only require proof on the balance of probabilities. Paying such a penatly, when your council deem it to be due, is part of being a social citizen, regardless of whether or not you think it is fair. In any case, if you are afraid of others placing their waste in your bin, you are free to watch it until it is emptied and then promptly remove it back to the security of your property. Maybe in the future locking bins will be issued.

I've just had a look at my bin - the hole for the tag is there - I bet all these bins come from the same factory and are made with the same moulds - just change colour according to the branding of the council involved - but there is no tag. Maybe soon.

These bugs could be used to charge householders more, the more they throw out, this will only make flytipping worse as you cannot recycle evertything that you use. Theres nothing worse than traveling aound the countryside on a bike ride and passing a gateway with a pile of rubbish, mattrass, bricks and fast food packets and black bin bags that some lazy fuckwit has piled up.

rfid tags may be useful, especially if they can be reprogrammed by the end user. But if the state insists on hiding these things secretly the best solution is to destroy them. Here are instructions on how turn a disposable camera into a device to invisibly render them inoperable.  https://23b.nadir.org/rfidzapper

Hmmm. Better hide that big white house number painted on the side of the bin then. Can't have people identifying who owns a bin.

Foobar...
The issues are not as much to do with identification, but with control and secrecy. The creation of uniquely identifiable objects and there assignment should be done in a way that is consensus based and open. As should be the use that is made of the data that is collected. As is is the state is going about these activiities in an underhand way. If we have nothing to fear from it why is it not discussed in public.

The marking of your rubbish bin ( or clothing) by the state is completely different from me doing it as an individual. One process i am in control of the other i am not.

Ok these bins and their tags are council property fair enough they paid for it so I will return it to them, Meanwhile I have bought an old wheelie bin off Ebay tag free it still fits the lorries and meets all the relevant standards making it safe and my council taxes pay for it to be emptied. So they have no grounds on which to take it away its all safe and legal, if they put a bug in it I am within my rights to remove it because it's my bin, If they replace it then its stealing because this is my property. On another note how do these bins know what you’re throwing away? Because as far as I have being told they are just a unique I.D. number that identifies it with your house and all it does is report the number to the bin cart when it’s being weighed. How the hell does it know what’s going in the bin?

Sam 1 - Council 0.

Just found my tag poped it off and hammered it to death with a 22oz eastwing hammer.

Taken from their web site...If it were to get removed and boiled and replaced. The council could not prosecute for damage, as there would no proof?

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