Recycling, what do you do?

[Sparrowlegs248]

I've heard that if you put the wrong thing in your recycle bin, the whole load is dumped. I don't know if this is still true, or ever was true. But this and a leaflet from the council has got me thinking. The leaflet asks for all items to be washed and dryer before putting in the bin.

I know some family members who put anything plastic in, despite it not being on our councils list. People who put drinks bottles in with a bit still in, or food containers with food still on them. (The foil tray sort that have been in the oven). They've said it's too much work to clean them, which I can see as they would need soaking and scrubbing. Would it be better to just throw them in the rubbish?

Do you wash and dry recycling? How much effort do you go to? I tend to rinse things as I go along so am not dealing with dried on bean juice for example.

I rinse things but I don't wash them, no. I also bin black plastic food packaging as that can't be recycled anyway. Our council takes almost everything else from the doorstep scheme, but how much actually gets processed and used I'm dubious about tbh.

If you put the wrong items in the recycling containers they dont take the recycling here.
This week I put two shoeboxes into my plastic/can bag because it was raining and I had no room in my glass/cardboard container, shoeboxes were sat on top on plastic so easy for bin men to throw in the cardboard pile ( they have to sort the glass / cardboard container into their lorry ).
Nope!
They refused to take the bag and took the time to attach a leaflet with hand written note to say my bag contained cardboard.. It would of taken them seconds to remove the cardboard.

I'm getting more and more fucked off with all the time we are expected to spend sorting and rinsing recycling...

We have no recycling collected from our house. The council doesn't offer it in our area even though we're inner city nowhere rural or hard to get to. So we try to avoid bringing it into the house in the first place. We'll take glass bottle and jars to the bottle bank at Tesco and compost or burn what we can but the rest goes in the bin.

I thought everywhere recycled tree days, I am fairly rural and have a general recycling bin, and a small kitchen waste caddy.

We have food recycling, glass and cardboard (which includes Clothing, shoes, electrical items and car batteries) and plastic and tetra type packaging and tins and foil.

Any packaging with raw meat in I put in general waste as I am not happy to start washing packaging containing harmful bacteria and placing it in my recycling where my little kids can get at it.