An Instagrammer has found one man’s rubbish really is another’s treasure after clocking up thousands of followers on his account posting snaps of the region’s best bins.
The ‘Bins North East’ Instagram page has racked up more than 17,000 followers with its daily posts of the waste-storing receptacles from across the region.
Followers even contribute their own bin pictures to the account which was started as a joke in December 2020 before amassing the huge following.
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The anonymous ‘bin-stagrammer’ behind the account, 25, says he can’t believe how many followers it has reached.
He said: “Initially it was as a bit of a joke poking a fun at a mate of mine who at the time had started posting images of random stuff like shop shutters and other bits and pieces around Newcastle.
“I thought it would go on for a few weeks, me and my mates would have a little laugh about it and then it would sort of taper off.
“I think that in the back of my head I had thought that there would be a few people that would find it funny and engage with it ironically, but the amount of people that follow the page and send in content still surprises me.
“I couldn’t quite believe it when the page hit 100 followers, let alone 17,000!
“I just find it funny how big it has gotten.”
Bins on fire, with for sale signs and fake legs sticking out of them, wearing wigs, and even wheelie bins travelling on the Metro all feature on the account which says it is the 'premium page for North-Eastern bin content'.
It currently has a 400-bin backlog of pictures waiting to be posted, with an influx of submissions coming after stormy weather when waste is strewn across roads and bins tipped over.
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“Choosing the bin for any given day is usually just a case of looking through my drafts and seeing which one strikes my fancy. Sometimes its dead easy and a caption I find funny comes to mind, other times it can take a while to think of what to go with,” the retail-worker-cum-'binfluencer' behind the account added.
“I generally get a lot of submissions, usually have a handful waiting in my DMs every day.
“One of the busiest times is if there has been strong winds or a storm, I’ll end up with absolutely loads of submissions with bins strewn across alleyways or getting chucked through the air by the winds!
“Because I only post one bin a day I have a huge backlog of bins that have been sent in, currently sat on over 400 drafts waiting to be posted.”
“My family and friends that know about me running the page tend to just find it funny that so many people would follow a page about bins.
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“Because I run it pretty anonymously, I’ve had a few situations where I’ve heard people talking about the page or even recommending it to me!
“It’s always nice to hear that people like the page and its funny hearing them talk about something that I started as a bit of an inside joke that’s grown in the way it has.”
You can check out the page by visiting @bins_northeast on Instagram.
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