Every lorry weighs every bin as it lifts it and the weight goes to an account. Ours runs one household heavy, every week, and the extra bag is always in the same corner.
I am the caretaker of a forty two flat block and I know more about refuse than anybody should.
The bins are weighed. People do not realise this. A communal bin has a chip in the lip, the lorry's lifting gear reads it, and a load cell weighs the bin on the way up and on the way down. The difference is what came out of it and it is logged against the account.
The reason is money. A council is charged by the tonne at the transfer station, and commercial and communal accounts are billed on what they actually produce.
So every Thursday I get a figure, because I asked for the reports in 2018 and the waste team were pleased anybody was interested.
Our figure runs high by about eleven kilos a week.
That is not noise. Household waste per person per week in this country is about four and a half kilos, so eleven kilos is between two and three people, or one small household.
The block has forty two flats and a known occupancy, because we are a management company and we hold the register. Seventy nine residents. Our tonnage comes out at eighty two or eighty three people's worth, every week, for seven years.
I chased it the way a caretaker would.
Somebody outside using our bins. This is the obvious and commonest answer. Fly tipping into a communal store is a plague and the cure is a lock, so in 2019 we put a coded gate on the bin store and changed the code twice a year.
The figure did not change.
Trade waste. A shop on the corner using the residents' bins is the other classic. I went and asked, politely, and then I watched, and then the council checked the shop's own account and it is correct and current.
The weights. Eleven kilos is close to the tolerance of a load cell on a moving lorry, and I pushed on that first, because I wanted it to be that. The waste team's own answer was that a single lift has a tolerance of a kilo or two and that a weekly figure across five bins averages out, and that an eleven kilo bias across seven years is not a calibration question.
So I started doing something that I would rather nobody knew about, which is that I go down at half five on a Thursday morning, before the lorry, and I look.
There is always an extra bag.
Black, ordinary, tied in the ordinary way with the neck twisted and knotted, the way most people tie a bin bag without thinking about it.
It is always in the same corner of the store, on the floor, not in a bin. The far corner, past the fifth bin, where there is a gap of about a metre before the wall and where nobody puts anything because you cannot get a wheelie bin in there.
It weighs, on the luggage scale I keep in the cupboard, between ten and twelve kilos.
What is in it.
Household waste. I have opened eleven of them over seven years and I have never been able to make myself open a twelfth.
Food packaging, peelings, tea bags, a milk carton, junk mail, a crisp packet. Two of them had the ash and clinker you get from a solid fuel fire, which no flat in this building has, because we went to gas in 1988.
One had a chemist's paper bag in it with a dispensing label on it. I read the label. I am not going to write down what it said, because it had a name on it and a date, and the date was in the 1970s, and the bag and the label were not old. The paper was clean and white and the print was sharp.
The lorry takes it. That is the whole mechanism of this story.
The crew loader walks into the store, picks up the loose bag, and throws it in the back with everything else, because that is the job and a loose bag in a bin store is the most ordinary thing in the world.
So eleven kilos of somebody's household waste leaves this building every Thursday and goes on our account and is billed to forty two flats at a few pence each, and has been for seven years.
What I have done about it is change one line in my own weekly sheet.
The sheet I give the directors has a line for waste tonnage and a line for the variance against occupancy, because I put it there, and for four years that variance had a question mark next to it.
In 2022 I took the question mark off and wrote a number in the occupancy column instead. Not seventy nine. Eighty one.
Nobody has ever asked me how I arrive at the occupancy figure, because a caretaker who counts his residents is a caretaker doing his job.
And on a Thursday morning I go down at half five and I do not turn the light on, because the light is on a motion sensor at the gate end and it does not reach the far corner anyway, and I lift the bag out with one hand and put it by the bins where the loader will see it, and I come back up.