News / Rubbish
Bin store becomes cause of plight for residents
A broken washing machine, a dilapidated mattress and a defunct printer are just some objects of eyesore scattered inside a bin enclosure, primarily meant for residents in and around Warden Road in Bedminster.
The bin store on the junction of Warden Road and Herbert Street is certainly an upgrade from the string of bins lined up on the pavement until recently, but has somehow failed to resolve an issue residents have been tackling since before Covid.
“When the project was finished, they put some padlocks on the gate,” Robert Pfunder, a resident in the area, told Bristol24/7. “But unfortunately, they didn’t provide us with a code.”
Rubbish continues to be left outside the bin store, causing hygiene concerns – photo: Karen Johnson
Pfunder continued: “Obviously, the padlocks were designed to stop just anybody coming and using the bin area who is not on the list of people who are supposed to use it.
“So I asked them to send us the code and they said, ‘We have done. We’ve sent a letter.’ So I walked down the street and I spoke to every one of the residents that I could one afternoon that I had off from work. No one had received a letter apart from one person in one house who had a letter.”
Despite Pfunder and other residents’ best efforts to get the code to nearly all residents, they feared that “probably there were still some people who didn’t know the code”. To allow all residents to use the bin store, Pfunder and others decided to stop locking the gate, which he admits is when things began to worsen.
Most of the objects seen by Bristol24/7 on Wednesday have been at the site for at least three weeks – photo: Robert Pfunder
Pfunder said: “That’s when it started to get misused straight away. We get fly tipping there, people will come from outside of the road that don’t live here to use it. In fact, we’ve actually stopped and questioned some people as they were bringing stuff in and assumed that they would say ‘Oh yeah, sorry, we didn’t realise or whatever’. But their response was that they had been directed here by the tip in St Philip’s Causeway.”
Metal fences enclose a fleet of bins currently at the bin store near Warden Road. The widely spaced fences make it easy for anybody to throw rubbish over the fence with or without a code to the locks.
“We’ve spent £75,000 pounds moving the bins from the pavement to a cage. That’s a lot of money, and it’s not okay for it to look like this,” councillor Christine Townsend said while speaking to Bristol24/7 on Thursday.
The current structure of the bin store makes it easy for anyone to throw garbage over the metal fences – photo: Karen Johnson
Townsend continued: “It’s always been a place that’s just open and accessible by anyone. It’s always attracted fly tipping, and the point of this bin store is to try to close it off, secure it so it’s only for residents with a decent code, and to cover it. So if you walk past it and you didn’t know it was a bin area, this ain’t gonna happen now.”
Calling it a “structural and institutional incompetence”, Townsend compares the bin store near Warden Road to the ones around Queen’s Road, which are generally covered with wood concealing the bins and the interior.
While the residents resorted to locking the gates of the bin store again, the padlocks themselves were stolen a few weeks later. Bristol Waste did swiftly replace the locks; however, once again, most residents didn’t receive a letter with a code to the locks.
When Bristol24/7 visited the site on Wednesday, one of the two gates was open, but it was unsure if this meant the code had reached all residents.
During the full council meeting on September 9, Townsend questioned the vice chair of the Homes and Housing Delivery Committee, Richard Eddy, about the state of the Warden Road bin store, which she said “remains unfinished” two years after it started.
Responding to her question, Eddy said: “The project has been completed as per the original specification and has been signed off as complete by a surveyor.
“Any further works will require additional funding, as they did not form part of the original specification and would be a new project. The Housing Revenue Account contributed land and approximately £20,000 towards the project via a Neighbourhood Improvement Bid, as the funding from CIL was insufficient.
“There are five Bristol City Council tenants who live on Warden Road and can use the store. The rest of the road is made up of privately owned properties.”
Bristol24/7 has contacted both Bristol Waste and Bristol City Council for a comment on the issue.
Main photo: Karen Johnson
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