Vivid Ready

Bins stop being emptied within days of most disruptions. The answer is to stop producing most of it, because the two things that actually cause trouble are food waste and anything wet.

How fast this becomes a problem

Bin collections are among the first services to stop, in almost any disruption: a strike, a fuel shortage, snow, flooding, a wider failure. And unlike water or power, most households have no plan at all.

The timeline is quicker than people expect:

Days 1 to 3: bins fill. Nothing else happens.
Week 1: food waste starts to smell, flies arrive, and in warm weather maggots.
Week 2: rats and gulls find it, bags get torn open, and waste is now spread rather than contained.
Week 3 onward: it is a genuine disease risk, a rodent problem that will outlast the disruption, and an argument with neighbours.

Flies and rodents are the reason this belongs in the sanitation domain, not in housekeeping. Both carry material from waste to food, which is the same faecal-oral route the composting toilet and handwashing pages are built around.

Sort at source, from day one

The single most useful habit, and it has to start immediately rather than when the bins are already full.

Five streams

Stream	What	Where it goes
Compostable	Vegetable peel, fruit, tea, coffee, garden waste, paper towel	Compost heap
Burnable	Clean paper, card, untreated wood	Fire, within the law below
Inert	Glass, metal, ceramics	Stored, clean and dry
Problem waste	Plastic, foam, treated wood, batteries, chemicals, nappies	Stored, sealed
Sanitary and clinical	Nappies, dressings, sanitary waste	Sealed, burned or buried. See sharps

Sorting is what makes everything else possible. Mixed waste can only be stored; separated waste can mostly be dealt with. And the wet, smelly, rat-attracting fraction is small once you take the food out of it, which is the point of the next section.

Food waste, which is the whole problem

Take food waste out of the bin and the bin stops being a problem. Almost everything unpleasant about uncollected waste comes from this fraction.

In order of preference:

Do not produce it. Cook what you will eat, use leftovers, and treat waste as the failure it is when food is finite.
Feed animals, if you keep them. Hens take most vegetable scraps, and pigs take almost everything, though there are legal restrictions on feeding catering waste to livestock in normal times.
Compost it. A proper heap handles vegetable waste, peelings, tea, coffee and garden material.
Bury it, in a trench in the garden, at least 30 cm deep and covered well. Effective and it feeds the ground.
Burn it, which works badly. Wet food does not burn, it steams and smells.

Burning, and what UK law actually says

Worth being precise, because there is a great deal of confusion and the law is not what most people assume in either direction.

DANGER

Never burn plastic, foam, rubber, treated timber, painted wood or anything with a coating.

This is not primarily a legal point, it is a health one, and it applies whether or not anyone is enforcing anything. Burning those materials releases dioxins, hydrogen chloride, heavy metals and other genuinely toxic products, and in a garden fire they land on you, your household, your soil and your food-growing ground.

Treated timber is the one people reach for because it burns well and is lying around. It contains copper and, in older stock, arsenic and chromium. The same warning appears on the firewood page and it matters more here, because a rubbish fire is unattended and downwind of the house.

In a genuine emergency nobody may be enforcing the law. The physical consequences do not require enforcement to occur.

If you do burn:

Dry material only. Wet waste smoulders, and smoke is the offence and the nuisance.
Small and hot, not large and smouldering.
Never when the wind carries smoke over neighbours, or over a road.
Never near a fuel store, a building, a hedge or overhanging branches.
Never leave it unattended, and never light it near dusk when smoke sits low.
Check the pile for hedgehogs before lighting. They nest in bonfire piles and it is a well-known and easily avoided killer.
Have water to hand, and see the carbon monoxide page for why this stays firmly outdoors.

Burying

Reasonable for compostable and food waste, poor for everything else.

At least 30 cm deep, covered and trodden down, so animals cannot smell or reach it.
Away from any watercourse, using the same 60 m as the latrine page.
Not where you will later grow food, at least for a season.
Rotate the trench rather than reusing one hole.
Never bury plastic, batteries, chemicals, paint, oil or anything with metal in it. It stays there, it leaches, and someone digs it up years later.

A trench system works well: dig a trench along a future planting row, add food waste and cover as you go, and plant into it the following season. Traditional, effective, and it turns the problem into soil.

Storing what you cannot deal with

For everything left, which should be a small fraction once food is out.

Rinse and dry anything that held food. A rinsed tin is inert; an unrinsed one is bait.
Crush and compact. Volume is the constraint.
Store in sealed rigid containers, not bags. Bags get torn.
Keep it dry. Wet waste rots, smells and attracts.
Somewhere secure and away from the house, and out of the sun.
Keep an inventory if it includes anything hazardous, so it can be disposed of properly when services return.

Assume services will return. Storing sealed and dry for months is far better than dispersing waste into the ground or the air, and it leaves you able to deal with it properly later.

Reducing what you produce

The only permanent answer, and it starts at the shop rather than the bin.

Buy less packaging. Loose vegetables, refills, bulk staples.
Reusable over disposable, everywhere: cloths, nappies, menstrual products, containers.
Repair rather than replace, which is the whole making and mending domain.
Keep glass jars. They are the preserving containers the food preservation domain runs on, and in an emergency a jar is an asset rather than waste.
Keep containers, buckets and tubs. Every one is a water container, a store or a bucket toilet.
Cardboard is fuel, cover material for the compost toilet, weed suppression and insulation, all before it becomes waste.

In a long emergency the concept of rubbish largely disappears, because almost everything has a second use when nothing can be replaced. The household that already thinks that way has far less to dispose of, and that is the real preparation for this page.