During our 20 years in business, we are estimated to have cleaned over 2millions bins. And whilst bins are a common site across the UK it hasn't always been the case. Today we take a look at some important moments in the history of bins.

A Time before Bins

Prior to bins, almost all of the household waste was burnt to ash. In-house bins were often improvised and provided by the household made up of wood or leather. Individual ashpit privies were commonplace in England up until the early 1900s when households would take any ash or rubbish to a privy situated at the bottom of their yards. This would then be emptied daily by a refuse collector.

Now prior to this, the history of refuse collection is pretty. Some bin use can be chased back to pig farmers who would use leather or wooden barrels to collect food waist to feed their livestock. This suggests that 9000bc during the early domestication of pigs was the first ever use of a bin.

Fast-forward to AD79 when fossilised remains of a wooden wheelie bin were found amongst the ruins of Mt. Vesuvius, suggesting it might have been the Romans who first decided to put a bin on wheels. Although, there are also prehistoric paintings of wheeled containers being used in the Himalayas.

In more recent times we have opted for metal cylindrical bins before evolving to plastic versions. However, it was in Switzerland in 1902 when the first modern-day wheelie bin was created, although it was the US in 1930's when the use of wheelie bins really took off.

Who invented the first plastic wheelie bin?

The modern plastic wheelie bin as we know it was invented by a company called Frank Rotherham Mouldings in the UK on 12 March 1968. However, it wasn’t invented for waste to be collected from houses or businesses, but instead to transport waste from one side of the Frank Rotherham Mouldings factory to the other.

The wheelie bin was used for this function only until a health and safety inspector visited the factory for a routine inspection and spotted the bin’s potential as a waste container; saving workers from the back problems commonly associated with waste collection at the time.

So there you have it. A brief look at the History of Bins. Who said Bin cleaning can't be interesting.

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