Ask Lemmy

Yeah, you can just request it from my council here in Melbourne as well and they'll do it. You can ask for a courtesy collection or say that it was missed.

Nobody requested any proof of my claim, they didn't even reply or confirm they were going to do it- they just did it.

Yeah I mean, it would cost them way more to verify that stuff than to just pick the bin up. You've also got to remember that garbage collection is a public health issue, especially in a large city, as well as an environmental one.

They also didn't care that my name isn't listed as a resident of the address I gave.

How would they verify that though? There's no such thing* as a "list of residents". They don't have access to things like elector rolls or driver's license databases and even then those wouldn't be fully complete. They have property title records but those don't show all residents and are useless for renters.

I think you're just surprised by something working by the honour system, because so many things in Aus require you to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt, like Centrelink. But more interactions with the government should be set up like this. We spend way more money trying to catch "doll bludgers" than we get back.

I used to be a garbage truck driver.

You drive the same routes week in, week out. You start to remember individual bins. For some bins, I would notice if they weren't on the street that week. Than I'd get a call from headquarters to pick up that bin and I'd say no, because I know it just wasn't there when I drove past it this morning. Most times I don't remember though. I get a call for a bin I don't remmeber, or maybe its not originaly on my route, and I just have to go pick it up. Its usually not a problem, I just pick it up when I'm in the area, or the end of the day.

Some people were notorious "late binners" and they'd be on the record. But if you just forget your bjn once, you can likely just call it in and blame it on them. Even if you're honest, they might still come collect it if they're a good service.

The only other thing we can check is if your bins have an electronic counting of weighing system. Than we can see if the been has been counted or not. That prevents you from trying a double pickup. The weighing system is especially important in summer and spring, when people have too much green garbage and arm of the truck literally can't lift it up. Than we have quantifyable evidence to deny your bin and you'll get a notice for it.

If the council is the collector they are just using taxpayer money for the extra trip. They probably won’t care unless you do this repeatedly.

My garbage collection misses my trash a couple times a year. They have a service request line and if you contact them through it, they will usually make a special trip to pick it up the next day. (city of 500,000 in Washington State USA)

Mine gets missed because we use the smallest size bin (its the cheapest option and we recycle and compost more then we trash) and the recycle and compost bins are like 2x the size. So if I don't put the garbage bin as the first thing they see, sometimes it gets missed.

No issues requesting a missed pickup here. It can be quite common if they get overloaded, i.e. after a holiday weekend. It’s probably far more costly to do verification on every instance but they may look into it if it becomes a common pattern.

Yeah, we call the township here and they'll send the guys out again. They're much better about actually doing that if the entire street was missed though. Once they didn't pick up our trash and only ours and we had to call the next day and get snippy. They came out though.

My county does a recycling pickup a trash pick up and a yard waste pick up.

I have called when my entire street didn’t get trash picked up a couple of times. I can’t think of anytime that only my bin didn’t get picked up.

I have called a couple of times when my yard waste didn’t get picked up. I suspect people putting yard waste outt is more sparactic so it get skipped.