Wheelie bins made it much easier to manage house and garden waste when they were first introduced, but they have come to play an even more important role in household and garden waste recycling in the decades since.
Their range of convenient sizes and ease of movement thanks to their wheels mean gardeners of all ages can deal with garden waste without unnecessary heavy lifting.
With a rainbow of colours and different sizes of wheelie bins – right up to big 1,100-litre wheelie bins available from websites like Wheelie Bin Solutions – you don’t have to stick to just using your council bins.
Here are five other uses for wheelie bins beyond just putting them out on bin day for your usual scheduled council collection.
1. Garden waste recycling and composting
You might live in an area with council collections of garden waste, but why give away a valuable resource?
It takes energy and nutrients to grow that foliage, so don’t just send it away for recycling elsewhere when you can turn it into nutritious compost to dig back into your flowerbeds.
Wheelie bins of different sizes can double as effective compost bins to allow your dead plants and pruned foliage to rot down into a rich fertiliser you can use yourself around the garden.
2. Secure storage
Large lockable wheelie bins can create some surprisingly secure storage for garden tools and other equipment that you don’t want to have to bring indoors.
Those 1,100-litre wheelie bins available from Wheelie Bin Solutions come in strong plastic or galvanised steel with optional triangular key lock.
You get plenty of capacity for storing all sorts of items inside, safely under lock and key, yet you can still easily move them around your garden – like a garden shed on wheels.
3. Outdoor entertaining
Wheelie bins can play a big part in outdoor living, especially in summer when you have guests round.
Fill a wheelie bin with water and throw in a few bags of ice, and you have an instant outdoor fridge to chill enough drinks for all your guests.
Again, you can buy a brand new wheelie bin from Wheelie Bin Solutions so you’re not storing drinks in a bin that has previously been used for rubbish!
4. Get organised
Council restrictions on what you can recycle can leave you with waste streams with nowhere to go.
If you’re not allowed to put food waste in your garden waste wheelie bin, or you’re banned from binning bark and branches, what can you do?
Why not invest in an extra wheelie bin of your own? Even if you still have to dispose of the waste yourself, it gives you a convenient and hygienic place to put it until you’re ready to take it to the tip.
5. Wheelie barrow
Finally, why not use your wheelie bin as a ‘wheelie barrow’ instead? Their upright shape makes it less likely that items like loose leaves will fall or blow out while you’re moving them around.
The balanced design of wheelie bins can also mean less heavy lifting compared with moving the same mass in a wheelbarrow, making it even easier to keep your garden in good shape.