Man fined £75 for dumping his rubbish - in a litter bin

 

Last updated at 00:46am on 16th October 2007 Comments

Ludicrous: £75 fine for dumping his rubbish - in a litter bin

 

 

 

 

With ten days to go until his next fortnightly rubbish collection, John Richards wanted to avoid a stink in his kitchen.

So he neatly packaged his food scraps in a carrier bag and deposited it in a public bin.

A few days later a letter arrived announcing he had been fined £75 - for misusing' the bin by putting domestic refuse in it.

Council snoopers traced him after rummaging through the bag's contents, in which they found an envelope addressed to him.

Yesterday 84-year-old Mr Richards, of Boston, Lincolnshire, said: "I've been fined for putting my rubbish in a bin and that's just ludicrous.

"The council told me I was flytipping. But I've never thrown litter in my life.

"Lots of people do what I did. My bin bags are collected fortnightly, and I have only a very small back yard.

"It would be intolerable to keep rotting food waste indoors for a fortnight until the next collection rolls around.

"Mr Richards reluctantly paid the fine after being warned if he did not pay in 14 days the penalty would double and he could face a fine of up to £2,500 if he took the case to court.

The retired journalist added: "The council say that litter is what you carry around with you and that what I put in the bin wasn't litter. But it's a very vague definition."

A Boston Council spokesman said: "Public litter bins are for everyone to use. If one is repeatedly filled by an individual with their domestic waste it creates a problem."

Mr Richards, who runs the Apostrophe Protection Society to promote the correct use of the punctuation mark, was fined days after the council launched a campaign urging members of the public to make more use of litter bins.

Readers of a local newspaper are being asked to identify culprits from CCTV pictures of litterbugs.

So the moral of the story is you can put domestic waste into litter bins, you just gotta make sure there isn't anything in the bag which they can get an ID from.

 

Why are people making a fuss of fortnightly collections?