The keenly awaited results of the Council’s much anticipated ballot on the widely loathed gull-proof waste sacks on London Street have been announced.
- Some 40 residents wanted to keep the sacks, often filled by passing strangers, emptied once a week, in many cases by untrained birds
- An impressive 41 residents failed to respond one way or the other, or indeed at all.
- Another 49 residents voted for a communal on-street bin service, to be emptied twice a week.
Gareth Barwell, City of Edinburgh Council’s Waste and Fleet Manager has now written to locals informing them of the result.
Spurtle is surprised the vote was won by such a comparatively small margin.
The advantages of not wading through other people’s mess are self-evident.
The difficulty of getting a large transient (human) population on the street to understand the gull-proof sack system, or obey it, has been obvious for ages. (Perhaps it is connected to the difficulty so many residents had in completing the ballot.)
If experience elsewhere across Broughton is anything to go by, we suspect even sceptical London Street locals will soon adapt to the new arrangement.
As they lie peacefully abed in the mornings, undisturbed by the ravenous attentions of unwanted visitors, conjuring images of impeccable pavements and care-free Waste staff gambolling cheerfully between Drummond Place and the roundabout, they may even wonder how they ever managed without it.