Something smells....

We haven't had a wheelie bin story for some time, but here's a rather disturbing one from Manchester.  A family with two children under two years old who, not surprisingly are still in nappies, found that their wheelie bin was too small to accommodate their household rubbish, including a week's supply of disposable nappies, and applied for a larger one. The response of the council?  No - you should be using "real" cotton nappies.  Now you can argue the pros and cons of disposable versus real nappies, but is it a proper function of a local authority to seek to dictate which you should use?  The disturbing aspect of all this is that it appears the council have some sort of deal with a local company producing cotton nappies, and therefore have a conflict of interest.  When my kids were little, we didn't have the choice, and as the person responsible for laundering the nappies (happy memories of plunging hands into a bucket of freezing cold water in which they were soaking in Milton and wringing them out) I would have given my eye teeth for disposables!