We don't seem to have issues with it it, thankfully. Though tbh, I got a toter bin with a proper hinged lid on it when I moved into my house and it's significantly better than anything the city has ever given me. Never had a problem with it getting collected too.

The green one from the city is just secondary.

Could be the cold for some of them. I used to bike to work yearround in Boston, and had a basket zip-tied to my rear rack. During one of the sub-zero days, a sharp jostle on the MIT bridge snapped 3/4s of them.

they also tend to have other laws that are enforced that pave the way for things like wheelie bins to work.

one of the biggest examples is parking enforcement. worcester does not ticket for parking on the sidewalk, obstructing the sidewalk, obstructing anything, really, in it's residential neighborhoods.

I'm not talking about downtown or in spread out places. drive around any triple decker neighborhood. you'll see cars parked on the sidewalk all the way down the road. you'll see ass ends of cars sticking out of driveways blocking sidewalks.

how exactly do you think places like Cambridge and boston are able to have their trucks have access to the bins? it's because they ticket the hell out of people for parking the way we park on worcester 24/7 with no repercussions.

a lot of things would have to be enforced and regulated to make it work, and not to spoil the end for you, but worcester isn't going to do it.

worcester isn't going to do anything but rush out ideas that "work elsewhere" without laying any of the groundwork that "elsewhere" did.

I'll be back in these comments with my "told you sos" just like with these stupid ass lidded bins. it's just a matter of when.

Worcester is the second biggest city in New England. If other cities surrounding Boston: Somerville, Cambridge etc can have bins, so can we. Those cities are densely populated and lots of small roads, like worcester, that also have street parking. If other Dr fly populated cities can make it happen then it’s not out of reach here.

so boston has a law requiring dumpsters for 4 or more apartments? and you think that's the same?

those "larger" quad deckers make up roughly half of the wooden multifamilies in the city, yes, half of our "triple" deckers have 4 apartments and there ain't no dumpster requirement here.

i wish smarmy Big City Folk™ would compare apples to apples when explaining to us yokels how much better it gets done elsewhere. i hear they have subways in boston, too. surely the same car culture/requirements exist in both places, also?

have you ever seen a booted car in worcester? a red zone sidewalk? a car ticketed for parking violations on dense residential side streets?

newsflash: worcester doesn't enforce anything. worcester doesn't require quad decker owners to have dumpsters. there are dozens of ways in which worcester is nothing like boston and dozens of reasons why. good reasons? what's the difference?

worcester is not boston. worcester does not function properly at many levels. lots of things will not work here because they require a pre-existing functional framework to bolt new ideas onto.

stop pretending you don't understand this. it's a bit obnoxious.

While I’m not necessarily disagreeing here, I will say, plastic zip ties become VERY brittle in cold weather and crack much easier than in warm weather. Above freezing temperatures and the plastics is malleable. Drop below freezing, you bend it just a bit more than it wants to and it’s going to crack right off.

This comes from years of having a green mesh privacy screen zip tied to the chain link fence around our yard. Every winter, about 50-60% of the zip ties crack just from the cold and the wind. So we have to keep a big bag on hand to replace them through the winter months. But we never have a problem with them snapping in warm weather.

I cut mine off the day I got it, figured it was just for keeping them together on delivery. If it isn’t windy I don’t put the lid on so the recycling peoples’ job is easier. If it is windy then I clip the lid on.

This isn't too complicated.

How does not putting them out at night resolve the issue? Our garage is the same temp as the outside air, so the bin is cold no matter where it sits at night.

I’m not sure how many people are even buying new city bins to replace the ones that break because they still take old ones or virtually any other plastic bin. I still use one of those old school Worcester green ones with an open top and my friend uses a big grey bin he bought at Wal mart.

We had FAR more issues in Boston with congestion and wonky street parking and 3 deckers. And, get this, there are hills in Boston too! It seems crazy but each 2 or 3 family in boston gets one rolling bin to share and the 2 or 3 apartments all put their recycling in it. Overflow could be placed next to the bin in brown paper bags or cardboard boxes. Larger landlords (4+ units) are required to provide dumpsters and the city routinely takes landlords to housing court to deal with trash tickets. They expect the landlord to provide adequate space for trash bins and to hold their tenants accountable.

It wasn’t an issue in any neighborhood (outside of beacon hill/north end where larger landlords provided dumpsters and the rest used clear bags because there was legitimately nowhere to store bins).

I wish Worcester would move past the whole “we’re so special our tenants couldn’t possibly figure out how to roll a damn bin to the curb”.

One neighbor’s zip tie is intact, the other lost their lid despite the zip tie because the bin handle was cracked in half.

Plastic being thrown around in cold weather is just a stupid idea. The city needs to tell casella to upgrade the trucks and get us stupid rolling bins aleady. Enough is enough.

Also, if the city had to pay to replace destroyed bins I guarantee casella would treat them better. Passing the cost onto us negates any incentive casella might have to keep the city happy.

100% they’re intentionally cutting the zip ties. I lost my bin this past week and found it down the street with no lid and a huge crack down the side. I think the lid slows them down or something which clearly irritates them.

I've made a few new friends at the Wrestling Open events upstairs at White Eagle on Thursday nights!

I used a piece of metal and self tapping screws to fix my lid , no one is breaking that again

Seems self defeating for the collection guys to be doing deliberately. Lids keep out the rain and snow, lowers weight on some days.

Those are some good points. Tbh I had no idea about the new bins until I got one delivered to the house. Thought it was a little silly but hey that’s why the city wants so I went with the flow. At least until collections started breaking the bins.

Bags are actually a good idea, I had never though of it. I guess we’ll see what doesn’t happen

Pure hockey is where my sister goes to get her skates sharpened last time I checked :)

Seriously don’t understand what causes someone to do this to a restaurant. the staff at BT’s is always nice whenever I go there. This man is disgusting.

Can't wait! Last one was so much fun.

i understand that recycling bags seem like an oxymoron, but it's the only solution that is feasible in our unique circumstance. all the 3 deckers with jammed street parking combined with way windier weather than most of the country makes this a challenge that no one wants to acknowledge properly.

people keep pitching ideas that cannot work here. giant wheelie bins that get emptied by a mechanical arm require access to the sidewalks, which are almost totally obstructed by parked cars from end to end on both sides. i suppose it could work in single family neighborhoods but what % of the city would that even cover?

a short cruise through a neighborhood on trash day will reveal the jokes that are Bins With Lids™ that people on this very sub were promoting as a solution like we don't regularly get 30+mph wind gusts. i was downvoted and insulted for predicting exactly what we got. trash is still absolutely everywhere on collection day and we paid extra for the privilege.

recycle bags may be stupid and anti-green or whatever, but it's the only solution that will actually work.

make the bags have perforated tops so workers can easily empty them, and make them out of something we can easily recycle locally. otherwise, declare the recycling program a failure due to implementation restrictions and stop bothering us with those stupid fucking yellow bags.

the sooner everyone gets their head out of their ass, the better. it's not fucking working.

They’re definitely cutting them or breaking them off in some other way. My lid also became magically separated after putting it out twice. The collection crews also love throwing the bins as hard as possible at the ground, because I came home a few weeks ago and a huge chunk was broken off the container, which is the same shit they did with the other style bins. The whole new recycling bin program was a complete waste of time and money. A better investment would probably have been making sure collection crews aren’t spilling the contents all over the road (which I’ve seen them do). Anyway I’m back to using the original style

Sometimes they come like at 6am though..

It's a very hard and very dangerous job and that smell that sticks on you. The conditions they work in along with the demanding schedule (no time for bathroom breaks) isn't for the weak. Trash collectors always have my respect.

Thanks for sharing!

It's actually very simple, it has to do with the fact that these are plastic zip ties, the colder weather makes plastic more prone to breaking, and these trash guys love to toss them around .

I ended up buying a pack of zip ties to have on hand.