And is it OK to drop a bag of dog poo into a random bin? | Nathan Davies

How long can you actually leave wheely bins on the footpath for before it becomes an insult to your neighbours? Nathan Davies explores bin etiquette.

Remember when every Aussie backyard came with an incinerator, a yellow brick memorial to the ozone layer into which all manner of rubbish was thrown and converted into toxic black smoke?

My nana’s neighbour had one, and she swore black and blue that he’d wait until she’d hung out the washing before firing it up, letting the afternoon sea breeze that blew up the hill from Boston Bay carry the noxious fumes towards her freshly laundered sheets.

If you were lucky enough to live on a farm you had the added rubbish disposal option of just digging a hole in a paddock and gradually filling it with junk.

Old bottles and cans, broken furniture, dead rats, leftover asbestos – it all went into the pit, and when the pit was full it was covered over with an excavator and another pit was dug.

Future archaeologists will delight in discovering the rusty old Pea Beu aerosols, VB stubbies and copies of People magazine.

Ah, the good old days. How good were they?

I’m kidding, of course – nobody wants to return to a time of polluting the atmosphere or the water table with our excess junk.

These days waste management is a modern marvel, with every household having three colour-coded wheely bins to sort their waste for weekly collection.

Can you put dog poo in another person’s bin?

But the rubbish regime does pose a few dilemmas that our forebears didn’t have to deals with, including:

•The retrieval rule: How long can you actually leave wheely bins on the footpath for before it becomes an insult to your neighbours? Hours? Days? A week?

A colleague, let’s call him Paul, commutes quite a distance to work and pulls long hours – meaning he’s not always around to pull his bins in straight after they’re emptied – has recently been the target of a cul-de-sac Cold War, with neighbours taking it upon themselves to stash his empty bins behind his hedge. A neighbourly move or the height of passive aggression? You decide, because he can’t.

•The dog poo dilemma: Is it OK to drop a bag of dog poo into a random bin when you’re out walking the pooch? Does it depend on whether that bin is full or empty? The size of the dog? The distance from your house? The position of the moon?

•The good neighbour: In a similar vein, is it OK to “donate” a bag or two to the bin next door if yours is overflowing? If so, do you proudly do it in broad daylight or wait for the cover of darkness?

•The recycling quandary: Do you get mad when you hear people rummaging through your recycling bin late at night, removing the bottles and cans? Well, you shouldn’t. They probably need the cash and you were too lazy to take them to the recycling depot, so go back to sleep.

•The dump deception: “What’s in the ute mate?” Oh, just … whatever is cheapest to get rid of? Of course I’ve never done this. Ever.

•The prawn problem: You’ve got a bag of heads and shells from Chrissy day, you’re about to head to the beach for a week and the weather forecast is in the high 30s. Can you put the bins out early and hit the coast, or do they need to stay in the freezer until you get home?

Don’t send me an angry letter, this is all just a bit of fun, purely hypothetical. I’m a good Bin Bloke, I promise.

At the end of the day good bin etiquette is, like all suburban politics, about having some respect and consideration for your neighbours.

I’m lucky enough to live in the kind of street that’s becoming increasingly rare, a street where all the neighbours know each other and keep a friendly eye out for one another.

Our neighbour across the road is – and I know she won’t mind me revealing this – more than 90 years old and she still regularly delivers homemade cakes, slices and biscuits to us and other neighbours.

The neighbours up the street once parked one of their cars in our driveway while we were on holiday because “a likely looking character” walked down our road.

It’s a lovely throwback to the past, an era where streets were little communities, dogs roamed free and incinerators blazed.

So, Paul*, if someone takes your bins in for you, just think of it as an act of neighbourly kindness and not an indictment on your Bad Bin Behaviour.