Britain’s aversion to bins is a crisis in the making
25 Nov 2025
This article was first published in CapX.
It began, as these things often do, with an M&S tinnie. Several, in fact. I was on the train to Manchester for the Conservative Party Conference with a rabble of SW1ers, equipped with the sort of portable picnic that passes for glamour on the Avanti West Coast – ready-mixed G&Ts, Percy Pigs – enough tin and plastic to justify a recycling initiative.
When we pulled into Manchester Piccadilly, I took it upon myself to collect the empties – a gesture of civic virtue that proved both futile and life-threatening. Try as I might, I could not find a bin. Eventually, somewhere near my hotel, my eyes lit up. I had found one – a lone receptacle gleaming like the Holy Grail. But as I attempted to stuff my bag of empties inside, one of the tins bit back. A sharp edge caught my hand, leaving a respectable gash.
Nursing my wound and my pride later that week, I did what any sensible person would: I Tweeted about it, trying to find out just why I had issue finding a bin. The responses came swiftly. My ignorance, I was told, was staggering. Did I not know that bins had been removed from many public areas because of the IRA? That the Provisional IRA had, in fact, bombed Manchester in 1996? That the scarcity of bins was not a matter of litter management but national security?
Central London is still governed by much of the same logic. There were reportedly just 46 bins in the entire Square Mile as of 2016 – a number that is shockingly low. Twenty were added in 2013, after ‘security assessments’. Yet anyone who has ever tried to dispose of a coffee cup between Liverpool Street and Bank knows that finding a bin is still ridiculously difficult.
The official explanation remains the same: terrorism. A bomb in a bin would be catastrophic, as has been seen on many occasions in the past. Better to have no bins at all than risk one being used as a weapon. But that argument, persuasive in the 1990s, now looks a little anachronistic. It carries even less now that almost every major city in the world – from New York to Tel Aviv – has figured out how to provide bins and deter terrorism at the same time.
Israel, with threats more active than ours, has developed bomb-resistant bins. Many transport hubs now use clear bins, which enable the contents to be checked at a glance. Even London’s Underground has managed a workable system – metal frames with transparent bags – proving that the capital can tolerate receptacles when it truly needs them.
So why not the City of London? Why not Manchester? The answer, I suspect, is cost rather than security. Bins require emptying; emptying requires people; people require salaries. Terrorism provides a convenient excuse to keep the numbers down and maintenance contracts light. There is something exquisitely British about it: a policy born of fear, preserved by inertia, and then justified by budgetary caution. The war on waste has been won, not by counterterrorism units, but by local government accountants.
Paris, with a population of 2.1 million, boasts over 30,000 bins – one every 100 metres, one in every seventy people. New York’s sanitation department manages around 23,000 litter baskets. The Square Mile’s 46 bins work out to roughly one per 10,000 inhabitants, once commuters are included.
But then you dig a little deeper and the absurdities carry on. Local authorities insist that fewer bins end up reducing litter by “encouraging people to take rubbish home.” Anyone who has ever walked through Clapham Common after a sunny Saturday afternoon knows that this is nonsense. What actually happens is that waste migrates. Cans are balanced on bollards, Pret cups are left like urban cairns and plastic bags are tied mournfully to railings.
This, in turn, requires more street cleaning, which costs money – and so the supposed saving on bins is consumed by the greater cost of dealing with the mess that replaces them.
It isn’t that councils set out to moralise in the first place, the sermon comes later. Cash-strapped authorities, squeezed by statutory obligations elsewhere, quietly let essential services wither and then repackage the absence of bins as an opportunity for ‘public responsibility’.
We have become a country more likely to commission a ‘smart bin trial’ than install a working one. London has experimented with ‘recycling pods‘ and ‘digital waste collection trials‘. The results, as with so many British innovations, tend to be fewer functioning units at greater cost.
Bin aversion also tells us something about the broader decline of civic ambition. Victorian Britain built public lavatories, gas lamps and libraries – visible symbols of municipal pride. The Britain of the 21st century can’t even manage a decent receptacle for empty cans
My hand has healed, but the injury to London’s bin density remains raw. We can’t say we’re a world city until we’re able to dispose of an M&S can without embarking on a 20-minute odyssey. This country excels at grand statements – Net Zero, smart tech, green transport – but it’s failing on the small, unglamorous business of everyday litter management.
And so the rubbish piles up. The public will continue to wander the streets, clutching coffee cups, looking for a place to put them – the perfect metaphor, really, for modern Britain: under-serviced, over-managed and bleeding, ever so slightly, from trying to do the right thing.