Recycling: How's It Going?

[Si Hunt]

Thought I'd see what everyone's latest views are on the recycling 'buzz'. Reading BBC news recently I was fairly shocked by some of the attitues on there: for example, "I refuse to recycle as I pay for people to take my rubbish away already", "It's just another tax so I'm going to chuck everything into landfill as a point of principle" etc. Surely this misses the point - we all need to recycle as much as possible, simply to keep this 'ol place tidy.

Tesco near us have just opened up a massive 'recycling machine', where you just chuck all glass bottles, all plastic and tins through a single hole and get paid points in return (albeit not very much, 1p for every four items, but it's still an incentive). How marvellous! And isn't it funny, now you can somehow recycle ALL plastic, and no more sorting bottles by bleeding colour! If Tesco can do this, why not the local councils? Our local scheme is a joke, expecting you to cart boxes 5 minutes down the road and drive 5 miles to collect the special bags. I'm going to drop all our stuff off at Tesco in future.

Being able to recycle all plastic has been a revelation, and our bin has never been so infrequently emptied. It makes me suspect that some of the archaic recycling 'rules' put in place e.g at the local tip are just meritless. It's never made sense why you can recycle a plastic bottle and not a plastic pot, for example, yet the dump bin still specifies 'bottles'. And why, when the bottles are smashed up anyway, did it matter what colour the glass was? Have you ever wondered how this could possibly make a difference?

Anyway, how's your recycling drive going? Do you see the point in it, and how much waste do you recycle currently? Are your local council pulling their weight in helping you? And will we ever get Pay As You Throw (condemned by MP's this week in a report). I certainly hope not, as I can't see how they can ever stop such a system being abused.

Si.

[Wayne]

I have to own up to not being much of a recycler. Mainly because unlike in my Mum & Dad's area (Lincolnshire), they have 3 different green, black, & grey wheelie bins for different things which are collected seperately. Whereas here in Nottingham we've just got the one bog stanadard green wheelie bin that covers everything.
I don't even know where my nearest recyling place is. I certainly haven't seen anything here in the city centre.

[Si Hunt]

I think I do it for selfish reasons!! I feel untidy chucking all this horrid unbreakdownable waste into a hole in the ground. For me, sorting everything into categories and knowing it's going to be re-used is theraputic, and makes me feel satisfied that I'm not leaving any mess around me. It's the Monica in me!

Si.

[Wayne]

It doesn't sound selfish to me. It's to be applauded! I feel a bit embarrassed because i think i ought to make more effort.
So who else has different wheelie bins provided by their local council? Or like me, do you just get the one?

[Pip Madeley]

We get a black one for regular waste and a green one for garden waste. No recycling gear whatsoever.

We do recycling at work though. I'm one of the Green Champions.

[Rob McCow]

Bracknell has the big green wheelie bin, plus two little crates, one for plastic and one for card. Although the plastic one has some bizarre rules about what they will and won't take. Such as - Plastic milk bottles, but not the bottle lids.

We save up our bottles and take them to the bottle bank every now and then. Also, I'm trying to get in the habit of using the same plastic bags each time we go shopping. This is actually going quite well at the moment! I have a big rucksack full of placcy bags that I try to remember to grab before we go to the shops.

[SiHart]

We have two boxes that are collected fortnightly from outside the house. We have one for paper and the other for plastic bottles/ cans. We take the galss down to the local shops and put it in the bottle bank. In a short distance from us there are 2 recycling points where you can drop off glass, plastics, paper and at some other clothes and books too. Bracknell is quite hot on recycling and you're never very far from a recycling centre.

We are also really hot on it at work. All paper is recycled (and indeed at the main library they fill a big Grundan bin each week) and I make sure that all the bottles go in the bottle bank. I even have got to know the local Green Party councillor who comes and collects all the bottle tops that don't go in the recycling and he makes money for a local charity from them.

We don't produce a great deal of other rubbish really. If we had composter too, we'd not produce a great deal of rubbish at all... but our garden isn't really set up for composting. There's not a lot of unpaved space- certainly not enough to compost. We don't fill our small wheelie bin even with the fortnighly bin collections we now have.

Si xx

[duncan]

We recycle at home, but the wheelie bin is only collected fortnightly. Come the end of the first week, the bin is full and we have to squash it down tightly to fit more in. But by the end of the second week, it is crammed and we end up throwing away stuff that could be recycled.

Since Greenwich Council introduced fornightly recycle collections, we have gone from 3 black sacks of waste each week to barely one. It's mostly food waste that we chuck away these days and that is collected weekly.

I'd like London Underground to step up their recycling as we only recycle paper at the moment.

[Si Hunt]

Does anyone know of a special bin where you can put food scraps? It would need to enable them to drop down into a bag so it didn't smell and then enable you to slip the food out in a bag and recycle it? If such a device existed we could recycle food waste as well!

Si.

[Wayne]

Also, I'm trying to get in the habit of using the same plastic bags each time we go shopping.

That's something i've been doing ever since Tesco introduced bag re-use points. My 'bags for life' are getting very battered though! I'll have to spend 20p on a couple of new ones soon!

[SiHart]

My 'bags for life' are getting very battered though! I'll have to spend 20p on a couple of new ones soon!

Aren't you supposed to be able to take them in and swap them for new ones when the old ones wear out? I thought that was the idea- but maybe that's the Sainsburys ones?

Does anyone know of a special bin where you can put food scraps? It would need to enable them to drop down into a bag so it didn't smell and then enable you to slip the food out in a bag and recycle it? If such a device existed we could recycle food waste as well!

That'd be a composter, which you can use in your own garden if you have one.

Si xx

[Wayne]

Does anyone know of a special bin where you can put food scraps?

Yes, it's called a 'bird table'.

[Wayne]

Aren't you supposed to be able to take them in and swap them for new ones when the old ones wear out? I thought that was the idea- but maybe that's the Sainsburys ones?

I don't know! I'll have to ask.

[Dirk Gently]

We have 4 bins, one black wheelie bin for 'household waste', one green wheelie bin for 'compostable waste' a small box for glass 'n' paper & a small box for plastic 'n' cans. Its habit now to seperate them out, we've been recycling it for about 10years or so.

[Si Hunt]

Well, we have quite a lot of food waste so I couldn't dump it all out for the birds, it would stink!

I'm afraid I don't really hold with the commonly held theory about not wasting food. If I've eaten enough, I leave the rest - it helps my diet. The old argument "there are people starving" is meaningless, as once its bought it's not like it can go to Africa if we don't want it.

I find reusing bags really hard to do - I never remember to bring 'em with me!

Can you use a composter if you haven't got a garden?

Si.

[WhiteCrow]

And I thought this was a thread about the ammount of recycled material which seemed to go into 42!

Seriously though it's interesting - 10 years ago my wife didn't care about "saving the planet". Now she's a recycling nut, this is a good thing. I think over the last 10 years ago recycling was something you had to go out of your way to do. Now it's a fact of life, and a lot of people just get on with it.

We can of course always do better.

[Si Hunt]

I think the only thing we don't recycle now is food itself and all that celophane plastic you get on packaging. And food shouldn't really need recycling anyway, as it must just decompose in the landfill anyway.

Si.

[Trudi G]

We've got special green recycling bags, that we fill up and put out on a Thursday morning, for the collection. It seems to work well around here, as most people fill the bags up and put them out.

[Rob McCow]

Robert Holmes succesfully recycled 'The Phantom Of The Opera' on more than 5 occasions. Terry Nation was also hot on recycling.

[Si Hunt]

You can get kitchen composters! Oh wow, quick I need to buy one! They're really cool and you get stuff to sprinkle on to stop them smelling.

However, they are 40! I just rang our local council as I found on-line that Sussex Council subsidise the cost if you want to buy one. But ours? Nah!

"We don't actually accept kitchen waste." said the woman. They don't take it at all! A few moments later I established that they do actually take green waste, but not kitchen waste.
"Surely it's the same thing," I reasoned. All organic crap, surely? But no.
"You need a different license for kitchen waste than garden waste," she said.

This is why recycling is in its infancy. How moronic.

Si.

[Paul Monk]

Was just going to post about kitchen composters, Si.

Our council are a bit rubbish really. We have a wheelie bin for household waste and a recycling box for paper and tin cans. We also have additional bins bought by us which we put glass and plastic bottles and which we take to local recycling centre which is always full to overflowing! We still have to seperate everything out which is an outdated concept. All recycling materials got to local MRF's (or not so local in our case, ours is in Middlesex) where everything is sorted. So theres' absolutely no need to segregate anything. I believe that this daft over complication of things puts people off recycling and its about time councils made it simpler.
We also have 3 composters in the garden for our vegetable and garden waste but nothing for the kitchen waste. One thing you need to remember Si, is that you need to do something with the compost you produce otherwise its just waste as well.
Even better than recycling is re-use. We have joined our local Freecycle groups ( http://www.freecycle.org ) and its great. How it works is people offer up stuff they don't need and other people take it. The aim is to stop stuff that still has a use from going into landfill. And apart from petrol to collect the items, it costs nothing. Recently we offered up our old but working tumble dryer and got a working fridge freezer for the shed.
Its worth checking out.
Its also worth remembering that whilst recycling is great and reduces waste and makes the country a cleaner safer place it doesn't reduce carbon production much as the processes used to recycle the waste creates carbon emissions.

[Paul Monk]

"We don't actually accept kitchen waste." said the woman. They don't take it at all! A few moments later I established that they do actually take green waste, but not kitchen waste.
"Surely it's the same thing," I reasoned. All organic crap, surely? But no.
"You need a different license for kitchen waste than garden waste," she said.

Our council is probably the same. If you had a garden it'd be no problem as you could use it in flower beds or pots.

[Nathan]

I think the worry is that kitchen waste can be contaminated with meat scraps and cheese and such like, which is a problem with recycling.

Vegetable peelings and waste wouldn't be a problem though.

[Si Hunt]

Why don't people just put organic/green/garden/kitchen waste into landfill? Surely whether you put it into a landfill or into a compost heap, it's still going back into the ground?

Si.

[Paul Monk]

I think the worry is that kitchen waste can be contaminated with meat scraps and cheese and such like, which is a problem with recycling.

Thats not a problem in itself though. Like Si said there are different licenses for garden and kitchen waste and the kitchen waste one is far more strigent.
As meat can attract vermin its more tightly controlled to prevent disease.
Kitchen composters, I think, have certain bacteria in them that renders meat and diary products harmless.