THOUSANDS of people in North Yorkshire have been told to empty their bins themselves because the work is too dangerous for council binmen.
Worried council bosses want residents to lift heavy containers containing cans and glass out of their wheelie bins before staff arrive to collect them.
They fear that refuse collectors could injure themselves if they have to keep lifting the conta
iners, called "pods" or "caddy inserts", themselves.
Craven Council's waste collection service has been described as a "dog's dinner" after it wrote to residents, asking them to do the job instead.
The letter, penned by waste and recycling manager Paul Florentine, reads: "Unfortunately the success of the scheme is having a negative effect on many of our staff due to the awkward height of the bins and the amount of lifting they have to do during their working day.
"This health and safety issue has been raised by our Corporate Safety Advisor and our Operational Management Team and we need to look at how we can improve the situation.
"In the long term we will look at the design of the storage and our collection systems but that will take time and I would like to ask for your help in the short term.
"Could I ask that from your next collection day that the 'pods' or 'caddy inserts' are removed and placed next to your blue bin for collection and not left within it.
"This would take a lot of the strain out of the job for our staff and reduce the risk of them sustaining injuries."
The appeal is going out to 9,500 homes in the Craven district which use a "triple bin" waste collection scheme.
Letters are being distributed in stages, and binmen have so far delivered about 2,000.
Mark Wallace, campaign director of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "This is a total dog's dinner.
"Do the council really expect pensioners to lug around bottles rather than the binmen doing it?"
A spokesman for Craven Council said residents had been asked to consider whether they could manage the lifting, but elderly or frail people were not expected to volunteer.
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