This image may have popped up on your interweb timeline at some point over the last few months. Your eyes are not deceiving you. This is not some AI image invention.

Bin and gone: a Croydon Council wheelie, thought to be in Ghana
This really is a Croydon Council issue wheelie bin, though not one put out for collection anywhere in this borough.
According to a member of the Twitterati, this bin was sighted in Ghana, approximately 4,600 miles outside the regular Veolia bin collection routes. Try logging that on the council’s Crap App.
Previous iterations of the image have claimed it to be a sighting elsewhere in west Africa, such as Nigeria. The definite location is impossible to verify.
All that can be said is that it is definitely not Croydon High Street…
Questions arose about how the wheelie bin came to arrive in Africa, with one suggestion being that it served as a kind of cargo packaging, used to load product – washing detergent, for example – for shipping to tropical areas where the product is less readily available. Which seems plausible enough.
Though with a typical 240litre capacity bin costing more than £30 for a replacement, someone must have been looking at some hefty shipping charges.
If you have other ideas, do let us know in the comments below.
But it also raises another question: have other products of Croydon’s Binmageddon have made it to other parts of the world?
And what Croydon bin has managed to make it furthest from Fisher’s Folly on Katharine Street?
If you find any examples, you know where to post them…
We’ve Ghana find out which bin can claim this Croydon all-comers’ record.
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They’re commonly used for local house moves in some parts of the UK.
Being used for an international move is next level! 😄
I have it on good authority that it was used to transport £437,000 in used readies to an address in Dulwich and then freighted to Ghana to hide the trail
The old Croydon recycling crates make great vegetable planters. Tall enough to raise the plants into the light, nice and robust, not needing enormous volumes of soil and compost, made with holes in the bottom corners which provides the right amount of draingage, and portable when 3/4 filled with soil and compost…… the sides protect the seedlings against drying winds, but the plastic warms up quickly to keep the seedlings warm. They won’t decay as a result of watering.
I rescued a large number that had been discarded in the streets when the new wheelies came in, making a temporary art installation in my back garden entitled the Great wall of Coulsdon.
They are also ideal for taking recycling like bits of wood, hard plastics and metal down to the Croydon council recycling centres.
Sad that so many boxes ended up just melted down–maybe incinerated at Beddington.
Doing the same Lewis and getting nice veg from them.
But I do recall a shipping company collecting stuff from a HMO prior to it being developed and a good 4 bins cling filmed and strapped with locks being loaded. The van advertised shipping to Nigeria port of Lagos though not Ghana. I imagine they are cheaper then crates and if sealed well would repel sea moisure damage.
I’ve got an olive tree in a redundant wheelie bin, which I sawed in half. The other half corrals some bamboo below surface level.
Can we give Jason Perry a one-way ticket to go and retrieve it? …….No need to rush back.
We knew Veolia were shit at leaving our bins close to where they found them, but this taking the piss.
It’s the Government”s new solution for housing illegal immigrants if Rwanda fails