Council apologises after wagon sprays car with 'smelly' bin juice

The incident happened on Wednesday, May 11, at around 2.20pm when a reversing bin wagon sprayed his Volkswagen Golf with "excess rubbish liquid" when emptying bins in Earl Street, Blackburn.

Farhan Patel said the resulting 'bin juice' had left a "huge stench" and despite efforts to clean the vehicle he would have to take it a car wash to get the disgusting mess off his vehicle.

Blackburn with Darwen Council said once it was alerted to the incident via a councillor it apologised to the resident the next day, following what was labelled an "unfortunate incident".

Mr Patel said: “As you can see my car is parked perfectly, as I know when the bins are collected every week.

"In today's case they were late as the burgundy bins are normally collected in the mornings.

“CCTV footage shows the spillage was caused by the refuse truck when it was reversing.

“My wife then had to clean this up, as I was at work at the time of the incident.

"It smelt disgusting where it had not been 100 per cent cleaned. It will need to be taken for a proper wash.

“It looks like they were trying to reverse the truck to collect bins from another street which I have seen them do before but this was then aborted for some reason."

Blackburn with Darwen Council said Mr Patel has had an email from the Systems, Waste and Recycling Manager apologising for the unfortunate incident.

A council spokesperson added: "When bags of waste are compressed within the vehicle, and particularly if there is liquid and food waste in the bags, sometimes this causes a build up of liquid which escapes through the seals.

"It’s a rare occurrence, to which we have no control over but we’re very sorry this happened to his vehicle."

Farhan said in September 2020 another incident had led to his car being scraped.

“That time considerable damage was caused to my old Honda Civic car which I had to scrap where in this case again the truck is again parked too close to my car risking another collision.”