We’ve got a brilliant list of FAQs that can help you with a quick question but we thought we should make life easy for you – which is what we do – and bring all those questions together in this easy-to-read blog.
The first question people always wonder is whether there’s a minimum term you have to sign up for to be able to get the marvellous Bin Cleaned service. It’s always reassuring when they realise that as a Bin Cleaned customer, you are free to stop or pause your service whenever you like. So for example, if you’re going on holiday, you can use our handy Holiday Form if you don’t need your bins cleaning while you’re away.
Next is the million-dollar question: why do I need my bins cleaned in the first place? Well, we’re really glad you’ve asked.
If you’ve got five minutes, wander outside and take a good look at your wheelie bins. Open the lids and inhale. Now you’re safely back indoors wondering whether you can get the smell out of your nose, we’ll talk about what you’ve seen and smelled during your live experiment (thank you for participating!).
The short answer is that it doesn’t take much for your bins to become dirty and smelly and where there’s dirt, there’s bacteria. That smell you got a good whiff of? Bacteria breeding and multiplying like a breeding and multiplying thing does.
The slightly longer answer is that your council typically empties your wheelie bin once a fortnight, which means rubbish can spend up to 14 days brewing all kinds of bacteria, which creates the smell we’ve just experienced and that weird orange-looking liquid that often appears at the bottom, almost from nowhere. Even with rubbish that has been cleaned, there’s always a residue left behind that can happily stew in its own watery juices, festering happily all by itself. The rubbish is collected and your bin scrapes the bin lorry, probably gathering up a sample of all your neighbours’ bacteria too to join the orange pool left behind. Pile on your next load of food waste or other rubbish and within a few weeks, you’ve got your very own special potion of listeria, salmonella, and e.coli growing merrily in your bin.
This is off-putting by itself but those smells that you want to run a mile from are a positive aroma of delight for local wildlife, including foxes, rats, pigeons, and gulls (other birdlife is available). Here is a potential feast for local unwanted animals who happily gambol from bin to bin, household to household, loving all the waste that we human beings no longer need.
We know what you’re thinking! “That’s disgusting! I’ll start cleaning them myself!” Will you…. Really? I mean we all have good intentions but do we all really have an external water supply, a hose, and suitable cleaning equipment – and the time – to properly and regularly, come rain, hail, or shine, pop outside and clean our wheelie bins every few weeks? Contrast your good intentions, the kitchen mop, and the garden hose, with our fabulous vans, gorgeous staff, and the specialised pressure washing equipment and environmentally friendly detergents Bin Cleaned has at our disposal (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun). You know, in your heart of hearts that we really are best-placed, trained, and equipped to do this frankly stinky chore on your behalf – and leave your bins spotless!
But what kinds of bins do you clean, we hear you ask? Well, we clean household wheelie bins of course, but if you’re a business owner with outside bins that could also do with the Bin Cleaned treatment, you’ll be pleased to know we can clean bins from the small 120L household bins as mentioned up to the positively huge 1100L commercial wheelie bins many hospitality and office venues own.
Frequency is always a bit of a dilemma. Knowing what I now know about my stinky bin, how often should I get my bins cleaned? Well, we’ve done the maths for you and on average, we would recommend that you get your bin cleaned about once a month or every four weeks – especially for your food waste bins. A four-weekly clean is truly the optimum cleaning cycle to keep those lovely wheelie bins fresh, clean, safe, and odourless. Mmm…. If you do have any special requirements, please just ask and we’ll do our very best to accommodate your needs whenever possible.
It is worth noting that occasionally if your waste wasn’t ‘household’ in a category or has been disposed of poorly and has consequently damaged the bin, we may not be able to entirely clean everything. For example, if your bin has paint, glue, tar, or burn residue from hot cigarettes or ashes from a wood burner or fire, then our system will not be able to remove such things.
Here’s the good news (well, it’s all been good, hasn’t it) you don’t even need to be at home when we clean your bin! All you have to do is let us know where you’ll leave your bin and for most people, that’s at the kerbside after it’s been emptied by the council’s bin lorries and team. Our guys follow the rounds each day and will put your bin back where you’ve told us, clean, smelling fresh, and with a rather fetching Bin Cleaned sticker to let you know it’s been done!
You don’t need to supply a thing – not the water, not the solutions, not the kit – we supply everything, even a cheery smile – so do say hello if you see our guys out and about while they’re working.
As Jennifer Aniston used to say (yes, definitely showing our age) now here’s the science bit: our cleaning solutions are all environmentally friendly and the business itself is accredited to ISO 14001, the global standard for environmental standards (I know!). As for the debris from all the bins, and the waste water that we generate during cleaning, it’s all contained in tanks on our Bin Cleaned vans. These tanks are only emptied at specific licensed points that are approved by local authorities and water companies and operated under Environment Agency rules.
To sum up: our Bin Cleaned service will remove all substances from your bin and leave it safe, fresh, and hygienic. Sign up now!
If you have any other questions relating to our services that we have not covered above, or you need more information, then please don’t hesitate to contact us.
