Maggots lay waste to my garden as green bin scheme backfires

I’m all in favour of segregating waste. Recycling, composting, avoiding use of tinfoil, changing to a low-flow shower head, adjusting the thermostat, buying my own coffee cup, paying bills on line, even hugging trees if needs be — I see being green as a good thing.

But the latest addition to our growing family of bins — which now stands at seven — has made me question if introducing a new caddy for food waste is as sound an idea as environmentalists think it is.

Up to recently, I had three 240 litre bins: blue for paper, red for glass, grey for household waste. The latter also took the grass cuttings.

Now, thanks to the requirements of the EU Household Food Waste and Bio-Waste Regulations 2013, which came into force on Jul 1, I have been given a 25 litre food caddy, that came with a mini-feeder — a four litre bin to keep in the kitchen. This, when full, is emptied into the bigger bin. It’s too small to be useful. The 25 litre caddy is expected to hold two weeks food waste. In my experience, it doesn’t, not for a family of five.

My experience to date is the food caddy is attracting more flies than the big grey bin ever did. Even though it has a sealable, lockable lid, flies somehow managed to get in. The upshot was a caddy-full of maggots.

As if that was not rancid enough, they escaped through the lockable lid, leaving both me and a portion of the back garden heaving, but for different reasons. It took a large selection of chemicals and many kettles of boiling water to kill off the filthy wrigglers.

By morning, they were dead, the pavement littered with bodies, so I kept my children inside because one of them is still small enough to crawl around on his backside.

Later in the day, the birds kindly cleared the murder scene, although I was afraid to open the bin for fear of what lay within.

When I complained, my waste collection agency kindly brought me another 25 litre food caddy with another mini feeder, bringing my bin count to seven. I also have a 90 litre bag for grass cuttings. At this stage the footprint of my bins is nearly half the size of my kitchen.

My waste collection agency is keen to point out they are simply obeying regulations requiring them to separate food waste and I am just part of a tiny percentage of customers (3%) to complain about the new service.

“While we have had some slight difficulty with the fine weather in the past few weeks, we’ve had less that 3% of customers experiencing difficulties. In general our customers are embracing this new food caddy service as they are very aware of the need to recycle more and more,” Country Clean said.

I appreciate that. Like I said, I’m all for saving the planet. I’m also glad to hear that Country Clean, despite the substantial rollout and increased segregation costs brought on by the new caddy, anticipate that by “being able to collect good quality food recycling”, they “should be able to absorb the increased costs over the coming years”. In fairness, they have also promised to review the frequency of collection, if the need arises.

My main problem is with the colony of flies that has invaded our domestic space and how this compromises hygiene.

When an environmentally-friendly scheme backfires to the extent that I’m afraid to leave my kids out, we have to ask — is this recycling gone mad?