YOU can never delve too deeply into a community Facebook group before the subject of the bins comes up.

The bins, the bins, the dreaded bins. Linger too long at the bins and, before you know it, someone will have chucked in a line about seeing a rat the size of a cat. 

This is plainly one of these made up things. No one has really seen a rat the size of a cat in real life. Has it become lore because it rhymes? Or is it just because it's easy to assume that everyone knows what a cat looks like? 

It's a dreadful metric of measurement, though, the cat. A feline-sized rodent is meaningless. Some cats have a lot of fluff that gives them an impressive extra girth to the old silhouette. A raggedy street cat might, in fact, be smaller than some of your medium-to-large sized rats.

New York has just appointed a "rat czar" who may have some answers. No matter how tall the rat tales on your local Facebook page, the rat anecdotes doing the rounds in New York seem outlandish. 

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Mechanics in the city report an increase in the number of rodents found in cars - chewing through wires and that sort of thing. The New York Times has a litany of rat horror stories, all with detail so nice it makes one forget the horror at the heart of the tale. 

In one, a graphic designer in a second floor apartment on Pacific Street in Brooklyn, lifted her kitchen garbage bag only for a rat to leap out and “parkour off my leg” before scuttling behind the oven.

In another, a gentleman was appalled to see a rat emerge from his lavatory. "I grabbed the closest weight I could find," he's reported to have said, "A copy of George Orwell’s autobiography, and set it on top of the toilet." 

Another woman was distressed when a rat wandered over her foot on a train, made worse by her having been sitting across from a clique of “cool teens,” at the time. "It was a dual horror situation of cool teenagers making fun of you, and a rat on your foot."

Kathleen Corradi is New York City’s new director of rodent mitigation, and it sounds like she has her work cut out for her. Ms Corradi is a former school teacher so presumably can deal with rats and teenagers in one fell swoop.

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Anyway, rats the size of cats. Over the past few years Glasgow has experienced a rise in the number of rats spotted in the city. There has been talk of a "waste management crisis" and the refuse workers, represented by the GMB union, have been on strike in increasing dissatisfaction with their pay and conditions.

No hint as of yet for a Glasgow rat czar but, like New York, the local authority has been trying to come up with new ways to make the city purse strings stretch while sorting out the refuse problem - all with the environment in mind. No easy task, and one must sympathise.

But will the proposed new waste management plan for Scotland's largest city really work? A pilot project is about to begin in the south side before being rolled out Glasgow-wide. It seems to be so bold a change as to be potentially bonkers.

Rather than having backcourt bins behind tenement flats, the council proposes to install large banks of bins in the road. Each bin hub will serve between 40 and 50 properties and no resident will be more than 50 metres from a bin. 

Somewhat optimistically, the council says the hope is that, rather than taking out the rubbish and recycling all at once, residents will bring out smaller collections of items when they happen to be leaving their flats anyway. 

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Will this be a suitable solution city-wide? We're all going to have keys to our own bins. Yet in some neighbourhoods, like mine, there are broken close doors because people can't see fit to bother with using a key or a fob to gain access to their own home. Will they keep hold of a bin store key or will the locks be broken within days of the bins being installed?

The council says enhanced enforcement will stop folk fly tipping next to the bins or dumping their stuff in the wrong receptacle. One of the penalties will be to refuse to empty the bin until the offending material is removed by residents. Strap in for a long wait there.

The council changed its trade waste procedures to a system whereby firms only put their rubbish out for collection during specific, short time frames. 

At all other times waste must be stored within commercial premises. "Waste permanently stored on our streets attracts vermin, causes litter and obstruction issues for people with mobility issues," says an official council document. "Improving the appearance of our streets will benefit all who use them."

Will large banks of bins on the road improve the appearance of our streets? No. If the system didn't work for commercial bins, will it work for residential waste? 

The refuse collectors have apparently complained of safety issues, such as the weight of lifting bins from backcourts out to the street. This new system will, the council says, address this. Hopefully it won't address it by cutting jobs, if residents are expected to change their behaviour to remove the need for a portion of the work carried out by binmen.

There will be no glass bins either, because the Deposit Return Scheme is supposed to make up for that. That's a whole other column. 

The bins are a constant problem and the council is right, in that innovative schemes should be considered. This one seems too easy for sceptics to challenge as an innovation too far.