There are no wheelie bins, rubbish accumulates on my street: what can be done?

Loïc Frémond loves living in London. On summer nights, the sound of laughter from pubs and bars wafts through your neighborhood, but so does the stench of garbage.

Garbage bags on the sidewalks are a common sight where Mr. Frémond lives – as in many cities -, the contents of which are usually scattered on the street; the result of vermin scratching them while waiting to be picked up.

Some of the garbage bags that Mr. Frémond sees are his. Eight months ago the rubbish bin in his Tower Hamlets apartment building was closed at the request of the council.

Until then, residents would take their trash and recycling to the bin whenever they needed it. On collection day, the janitor would place these bins on the curb for garbage workers to empty each week.

One day, Mr. Frémond, 29, came down and found the garbage dump closed. The janitor had been told that weekly collection was no longer an appropriate solution.

Instead, residents were required to leave their trash bags on the sidewalk outside the building, where workers would pick them up twice a day.

Frémond says this is not only unsightly, but attracts foxes and rats and clogs the pavement. And to make matters worse, collections are often overlooked.

“The trash stays on the sidewalk all night, sometimes until noon the next day,” he tells me. “Especially in summer, this was a real nightmare: the heat caused a rather unpleasant stench.”

Tower Hamlets Council has been contacted for comment.

Frémond believes sidewalks littered with garbage bags make his neighborhood near Spitalfields Market, a popular tourist spot known for its food and art stalls, less pleasant for residents and visitors alike.

Other London boroughs, such as Wandsworth and Havering, do not collect wheelie bins and ask all residents to place their rubbish bags on the pavement or just within the boundaries of their property.

Outside London, most councils, from the New Forest to Moray, use a flexible approach like Tower Hamlets, where residents use wheelie bins if their property can accommodate one and, if not, their bags of rubbish are collected from the pavement.

Mr. Frémond heard about a person interested in moving into his building who decided not to after seeing all the trash on the street.

He says other residents have talked about moving.

“It’s a frequent topic of conversation in the tenants’ group chat,” he says.

It’s not just household trash that ends up strewn across the streets, but also waste from local businesses.

Companies place trash bags on sidewalks for collection by various contracted waste companies they can choose from, which collect them at different times of the day.

“This means that at any given time you’re walking down the street, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll see piles of garbage bags waiting to be picked up,” says Nicholas Boys Smith, a former government adviser on urban design.

This competitive system, which Boys Smith says helps keep the cost of waste disposal down, doesn’t just affect people who live in densely populated cities. Cities with historic centers and narrow streets often don’t have space for large open-air bins in which businesses put their trash, so their trash bags fall to the pavement.

“[The system works] “It’s fine in areas where there are some dedicated, pre-built garbage collection points as part of a large new development,” he says. “Where there isn’t that is on the main streets and historic urban centers.”

Over the summer, Boys Smith visited Clamart in France, a suburb seven miles from Paris that was once an industrial site.

Local authorities have converted it into a residential area full of low-rise apartment buildings and shops; there is even a lake.

Underground bins have been built into the brick pavement of street corners, where residents can leave their bags in an elevated chute.

This leads to a large underground storage unit which is then emptied by specialized container trucks that have a crane attached.

These underground bins are clean, elegantly presented and make better use of public space, says Boys Smith. “They help avoid ‘death by wheelie bins’, which affects so many British streets [on collection day]”.

These types of containers also exist in Tower Hamlets, although not in the neighborhood where Mr Frémond lives. In Bethnal Green, a group of apartment buildings named after heroes from Greek mythology have underground bins for general waste and recycling.

In 2022, Liverpool authorities installed this type of containers in some neighborhoods. Sheffield authorities placed them in the city center earlier this year.

According to Samuel Hughes, a housing expert at the Center for Policy Studies think tank, they are the best solution for waste disposal in towns and cities and should be installed more to help residents like Mr Frémond.

Hughes used to live in the Italian city of Florence, where underground containers are common and, he says, widely used in most of Western Europe.

However, there are some challenges. They would have to be installed in places such as sidewalks if there is space or, failing that, they could fit in parking spaces.

“But obviously this creates a ruckus because it’s taking up space that people are already using for cars,” he adds.

Purchasing and installing underground bins is also expensive, compared to wheeled bins, so cash-strapped councils may not be able to afford them in large quantities.

Another obstacle is the set of cables and pipes under the streets that would have to be adapted in places where underground containers are installed.

Some British high streets are so busy that there are no parking spaces or kerbside space for underground bins, so people living in flats above shops have no choice but to leave bags of rubbish on the pavement.

Councils have tried various methods to make this tidier, from placing vinyl stickers on sidewalks showing where garbage bags should be placed to reusing plastic storage bins normally made for litter or dog waste.

Companies are trying too. Some in Putney, south-west London, have banded together to buy large electric bicycles that are used to transport rubbish from shops to a central collection point. Then a garbage truck takes away all the trash at once.

Frémond hopes something similar can be done to improve things in his area.

“Everything is on my doorstep,” he says of living there, but the garbage bags on his doorstep aren’t so welcome.