Biffa Bans ‘Bin Men’ From BlackBerry Blitz

Waste management company Biffa is at pains today to clarify any impression that it has given BlackBerry mobile devices to “bin men”.

Earlier this week, a press release announced the company would use BlackBerrys provided by Vodafone to track its 1500 refuse collection trucks in the UK. Predictably, the British media snapped the story up, mostly using variations on the phrase “Bin Men get Blackberrys” for their headlines. eWEEK contrasted the story with a report that a UK bank is allowing its staff to dump their Blackberries in favour of iPhones.

They’re not bin men, they are…?

All well and good, but apparently Biff doesn’t want the term “bin men”, and has set its PR company to contact all media and explain that it doesn’t like the image of guys (who could also of course be women) coming up people’s paths toting BlackBerrys.

eWEEK, along with the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, has had a call asking us to remove the phrase “bin men”, perhaps using some blander reference to Biffa “cleaning up”.

“The people who carry the bins up the front path won’t get BlackBerrys,” the spokesman said, “though the truck drivers will.” Which is of course, exactly what we would expect in a roll-out designed to track trucks.

Which leaves us wondering how else we should describe these truck drivers. The trucks collect bins – or at least, many of them do – so we think “bin men” is a fair description.

It also leaves us with the ironic feeling that Research In Motion’s corporate standing must be getting pretty low, if even a waste management firm wants to limit its association with it in the public mind.