15/08/2026
Do not read if squeamish.
Hello Helston,
We have a small problem to deal with.
This happens from time to time. People are .............people!?!
As a business we are responsible for paying another business to remove any waste and recycling we produce whether it's our waste or rubbish left by customers. We dispose of our own food waste but that still leaves some packaging, coffee beans, teabags, tissues, customer waste etc that need to go into our wheelie bins for weekly collections by our waste collector.
The council do not collect business waste like they do for residential properties on Wednesdays (locally to The Bean) in exchange for council tax.
Our waste is collected by Biffa on Friday early morning and we pay for every red Biffa rubbish bag that is inside each wheelie bin. Biffa only take the restaurant produced rubbish that is contained within those bags and they are always full.
Biffa visit us early morning once a week so our bins go out the day before and are removed from the street hours before we open.
This week (for the second week in a row) someone who clearly missed the council waste collection dumped their two black bags in our empty bins before we had the chance to move them and after our collection. So we were left with two bags of someone's rubbish for a week (then we get to pay for them to be collected).
These are not our responsiblity. We have little to no idea what is inside them apart from last week (sick, yep, you read that correctly, one of the bags contained rubbish and someone had delightfully been sick in the bag on top of the rubbish). The bags then sat in our bin until the day after when we went to use what we thought were our empty bins.
You may have noticed the weather is somewhat warm at the moment, which does horrible things to waste.
No one supplies the streets with wheelie bins for public waste so the perpetrator knows it is not acceptable to add their waste to those bins. The phrase "a bin is a bin, is not an excuse".
Obviously I could go through the bags to try to identify the person but to be honest I'd rather not for obvious reasons. However, if I am forced to because it continues and I discover who owns it, I will personally deliver it all back to you through your letterbox bit by bit, whatever its contents.
On a previous occasion I was at here after closing and literally watched someone emptying bag after bag of rubbish he had collected in his car into one of our bins. He then noticed me sitting on the opposite side of the window at the coffee bar at which point he removed them again and took them away.
On a different occasion our rubbish collector fined us for supplying waste over our permitted weight. Unfortunately they had removed the rubbish before I saw it, but they claimed it was over 80kg which is heavier than a lot of people. Our waste is never anywhere near that. Obviously we have no idea what was added to our bins and I dread to think what it was.
Please take your rubbish home or use the public bins that are within throwing distance of the business, just outside the Post Office or the outside the nursery opposite us.
However if it is home waste, your local collection day is WEDNESDAY outside your own property.
