IN response to the letter from F A Milligan (Hereford Times, May 10) regarding wheelie bins, at the end of last year we moved to Hereford from southern Hampshire, where wheelie bins have been in use by our previous council for more than 15 years.

While I agree that, if you do not have a side access to your property, wheeling it through the house is undesirable, they do have their benefits.

We were a family of three and we recycled or composted all we could, leaving very little to go into the rubbish bin. The council operated an alternate weekly collection: rubbish one week, recyclables including separated garden waste the next.

There were moans during hot spells that some people's bins became infested with maggots and flies due to the fortnightly collections, but we never had a problem with that as we threw away very little food waste.

When we came to Hereford we were surprised by the collection system. To have kitchen waste collected weekly is a bonus, to separate recyclables is fine once you get into the habit (previously they all went into one bin, excluding glass), but what we found strange was the plastic bag system. This is a rural county, do bags not get broken into by foxes or vermin? What happens to the coloured bags once emptied? Are they sent to landfill or are they recycled?

At least with a wheelie bin you retain the same receptacle and they hold far more than a coloured bag. And the idea of having new bags thrown into the garden on collection day seemed most bizarre. We have noticed bag balls in the road and verges where the wind has blown them out of gardens.

On balance I would be happy to have a wheelie bin and retain the weekly rubbish collection, but I understand from our previous council the idea of having wheelie bins is to introduce fortnightly collections to boost recycling quotas as required by central government. This may herald the end of weekly rubbish collections.

Mrs Linda Harding, Church Road, Clehonger.