Love Thy Bin

Love Thy Bin 

You’re the local council. Part of your responsibility to residents is waste management and recycling facilities. You encourage them to recycle, prevent litter, help with composting by using a food caddy, and keep streets tidy by removing their wheelie bins from the pavement after emptying. That last one is a bugbear for many residents, as they see wheelies left out overnight as an annoyance, an eyesore and a potential obstruction. But how do you make looking after your wheelie bin fun? That’s a tough one.

Torfaen County Borough Council has found the solution: Turn it all into a huge creative project called Love Thy Bin, and throw in some prizes to boot. Residents are invited to decorate their wheelie bins however they wish, with the winners of the best entries receiving supermarket vouchers as an award for their efforts. What a fantastic idea!

“This is a great opportunity to show off your artistic skills for everyone to see,” said Councillor John Cunningham, and we at wheeliebins.co.uk couldn’t agree more. Imagine if every wheelie down your street were customised by its owner; hundreds of mobile canvases sporting everything from stripes and checks to intricate designs by the more adventurous.

If you live in Torfaen County Borough, you could create a natural landscape across your wheelie, with a sun setting over a gentle stream or birds flocking above golden fields of wheat. Or you could take a very different direction and cover each side in street art motifs, like a miniature graffiti exhibition that doesn’t count as vandalism. Maybe you’d prefer to back your favourite sports team by painting the plain plastic with their colours, or get the entire family involved and add a self-portrait to each side. Whether the wheelie merges with its surroundings through use of greens and browns or stands out like a firework in the night sky thanks to splashes of red, orange and purple, you’ll be expressing yourself whilst also helping the council to return each bin to its rightful home (just make sure to include your house number somewhere in the design).

HOWEVER! If you wish to decorate your bin but don’t live in Torfaen County Borough, please check with your local council first – we’d hate for you to get in trouble. Maybe this could be an opportunity for you and your neighbours to create your own artistic wheelie bin project for your local area. Why not get some friends together and see what happens? Community spirit and pride in your neighbourhood can go a long way, and turning a regular, unassuming wheelie bin into a work of art sounds like great fun!