A FAMILY watched in shock as a binman contaminated their grey bin and then left it uncollected.

Naeema Aslam was confused when she found that their bin had not been taken on Wednesday, April 21, and it had their neighbour’s rubbish in it on St James’ Street in Blackburn.

She went to ask her neighbour why they had put their rubbish in their grey bin, as it was now contaminated, and her husband had spent time trying to sift through it.

But their neighbour did not know anything about it and CCTV later showed it was the binmen who had dumped the rubbish in their bin without explanation then put a ‘contaminated’ sticker on it.

Mrs Aslam said: “It took the council long enough to get back to me and when they did email me, they said it was my neighbour’s fault that their bin was contaminated, and they will get training.

“They said I could forward my neighbour’s details and they would educate them on what goes into the bins.

“I did not think they were taking responsibility for the binman’s actions.”

The binman is shown dragging the bins from the back alley into the main road, before emptying one into the other, sticking a contamination sticker on one and leaving.

She said: “We just couldn’t believe it and were shocked.

“We always check our bins because we cannot risk them being contaminated and cannot afford not having it collected, as we have three children.”

The family then got an email asking them to put their bins out on Saturday to rectify the problem but received it too late.

Mrs Aslam said: “I got the email about Saturday on Monday. My brother lives three doors down and saw when they came on Saturday, he asked if they could hang on for a minute as I was bathing my little one. But they left before I could put it out.”

Tony Watson, head of environment, said: “We would like to apologise.

“It seems that there was some confusion by a crew member over which bin the recycling bag belonged to, and this led to the incorrect bin being labelled as contaminated.

“We are also sorry for the lack of advance notice of our return to empty the bin. This has now been corrected and the bin has now been emptied.

“Human error can on occasion occur, when the crews are collecting over 60,000 bins each week. We have issued a reminder to all crews to be diligent when dealing with any recycling bags in this way.”