Hacker News Reader

Comment by benrutter | Hacker News Reader

This is cool

Semi related- did I read this righr that Portugal has a bin collection every day bar Sunday? (that sounds like a lot! I'm from the UK and where I live there's one a week)

View on HN

I think daily bin collection was normal in London until the mid 1990s or so. Also post was delivered twice a day and picked up from post boxes at least three times a day!

> Also post was delivered twice a day

And for something like 150 years. If you read say Jane Austin you find that they send letters in the morning and receive answers later that day.

It depends where you live, but in general, yes, bin collection happens every night except Sunday night. Here's the information for Lisbon: https://informacoeseservicos.lisboa.pt/servicos/dias-do-lixo

It really heavily depends where you live, in my hometown for example it's every single day at most, but it can be less depending on their assessed need. In my childhood street it's every day. On the other hand you don't have a personal or building bin, you only have street bins that everyone takes their trash to. https://fagar.pt/residuos

I just love how the days of the week are in english, and the rubbish separation labels are in portuguese.

Inside my head days are in English (or French), but what's written on the actual bin is Portuguese.

> where I live there's one a week

You're lucky you have this! So many councils have moved to every-three-weeks for general refuse, now. Council tax hasn't gone down to compensate, mind you. Not even the recycling is weekly.

Social care is always going to crowd out other spending for councils. I do wonder if that should be separated out to another body.

Taiwan does this, too.

I think NYC should consider daily collection. They have a huge curbside trash problem, and I suspect that there is so much trash accumulation by the time the truck comes by that a lot of labor is used putting the bags in the truck. Collecting 7x as often seems like it would not require anywhere near 7x the cost or labor, and the city would be a lot more pleasant with more frequent collection.

It depends where you are, in my city it's 5x/week, but twice per day. They don't pick up bins though, you have to go down and throw your bags into the truck.

There's also daily bin collection in Spain https://www.expatica.com/es/living/household/recycling-in-sp...

The last time I was there this surprised me, until I realized you really don't want your bins hanging out in that heat for more than a day. Sometimes it gets pretty bad even during the same day.

The iberians probably have cheap enough labour that they needn't bother, but a high-capital low-labour sol'n is to store rubbish deep enough* that even summer daytime temperatures don't hit their surface peaks: eg https://www.molok.com/benefits-and-principles/

* Fourier apparently worked this problem in relation to wine storage; see also https://topex.ucsd.edu/geodynamics/HW3_2010_presentations/C_...

I'm not sure what the bin collection schedule in Vienna is but what's really nice here is that I just don't have to think about it. There is a garbage room in our building that the recycling agency has a key to and they get the bins themselves. I would guess they come twice a week to our building but the garbage truck is in the street probably every day. Big difference to my experience in London.

Similar here in Helsinki, there are a bunch of bins inside a communically accessible room - paper, glass, metal, mixed, plastic, and biological rubbish.

There's some fancy schedule for when the various bins are emptied, but not something I think about. It seems to work out okay.

Compared to Edinburgh where initially it was weekly, then fortnightly, and now collections occur every three weeks from what I remember. Recycling wasn't even an option unless you counted the bottle-banks at the local Tesco.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com