Addresses in Swinton Street, Acton Street and Swinton Place at Kings Cross WC1X have finally received wheelie bins from Camden council.

This looks like a small ordinary and thing to most areas, but at King’s Cross is in fact a major development that took the best of some five years or more in the making. Increases in flytipping and as a direct consequence growing populations of wild rats made this urgent.

One obstacle was that it was not possible to order bins for areas inside of the congestion zone in the past-

What difference the wheelie bins will make remains to be seen. About half of the properties do not have an entrance without stairs or steps and other addresses open straight to the pavement. But it will certainly help. Camden are testing a second waste collection on Saturdays, in addition to Wednesdays and try to increase knowledge locally when collection days are.

The preferred solution by many was and renmains the Amsterdam Model.

How to order bins:

Bins can be ordered either for recycling or household waste or one of each.

Where there is not enough space for bins for each household in a block of flats, the neighbours have to agree to share the bins and take shared responsibility that recycling waste is always correctly deposited (it gets penalized per address and ¨not per household if things are done wrongly). Wheelie bins can also not be on the public pathways or stand where there are staors or steps.

You can also swap or add bins, say a household-waste for a green recycling one.

To order, swap or add a wheelie bin go online https://www.camden.gov.uk/order-bins#ltqk and insert your address and postcode. If prompted whether you live inside the congestion zone select no, even if this is false (the reason is that this is an old setting. Camden said is no longer valid, but it could prevent your order to go ahead, if you select that). You can also call the company that runs waste and recycling in Camden, Veolia on the phone on 020 3567 8105 or email on uk.occamden@veolia.com

Collection days in teh WC1X area are currently on Wednesday morning and currently also Saturday (trial). Please do put waste on roads only on the evening before collections (currently Tuesday and Friday evening). Veolia do also bags for other items (cloths or still useable electrical equipment) that will be picked up by the team on collection days.