to get a bit grumpy about recycling?

[Skyrg]

Sorry if it's been done before, but I'm driven nuts by this crazy eco stuff. We must all recycle or the planet is doomed! And then they don't really bother...

I am fine with recycling. I want to do it, I dislike the thought of all our stuff piling up in landfills.
However, I despise the council's mad lists on EXACTLY what you can or cannot recycle.

Examples:
They will recycle paper, but not cardboard.
They MAY recycle plastic bottles in your area (how do we check??) but you must remove the tops (fine, doesn't take much on my part but why can't they recycle those too?)
They do not recycle drinks cartons (but the cartons say you can!)
They do not recycle plastics other than bottles. What? Why? Fair enough if it's a different type of plastic, but they seem to only care about shape!

Now I have to recycle with a reference book handy, study the bottles/jars/containers carefully, and then still end up getting it wrong.

It just seems totally half arsed. Surely it's better to recycle everything.

Also, could they make ANY MORE NOISE when they THROW the glass into their trucks at 5 in the morning? To add insult to bloody injury, they won't take broken glass, yet clearly break your perfect, carefully cleaned jars when they fling them into the trucks.

Rant over

Also, boyfriend just found one of my clean socks in the recycling. We are both puzzled.

YANBU - I think all councils should be made to recycle evreything that's recyclable. We get so annoyed about recyclable items that our councils won't touch (and there's nowhere local to do it either)

But then I think that ALL nappies should be, by law, biodegradable (as in quickly) not just the 'special' brand ones.

And rather than limit shoppers' bags, maybe all bags could be paper now so they can be recycled

And Supermarkets should be MADE to get rid of excess packaging. If it weren;t for excess packaging, we would have very little recycling...

Grr

They collect your glass? Have you any idea how lucky you are?

I have an almost identical list to yours and asked a friend who works for the council why the list is so specific.

Bottle tops are removed because they are a different type of plastic to the bottle and the two types can't be recycled together. Same goes for the non-bottle shaped plastics. Some are okay, but enough of them are a problem to cause 'contamination' at the recycling plant. Drinks cartons are tetrapacks and/or are coated in wax/plastic so can't be recycled with normal cardboard. They won't take broken glass because the collectors may injure themselves picking it up.

Out of curiousity, what area do you live in? Your list is so similar to mine I'm convinced you're my neighbour lol.

It is irritating - our council take one collection of stuff, organised in one way (wheely bin for paper, cardboard, tins and plastic bottles. Another wheely bin for garden waste but not kitchen scraps even if they are nice compostable ones. Nothing for glass). Both collected by big bin lorries. The next bunch over have a plastic box for glass, paper, envelopes (which ours wont take), and put it into separate parts of a truck so it is ready-sorted.

Why can't they all agree what is worth doing and how to do it?

In Canada they make you tie your bundles of cardboard in a certain way, to a certain size or they won't take it. I refuse to do it and DH, who is a Canadian, does it for our household. And they change the rubbish and recycling day literally at least every month, sometimes every week. I think it's competitive recycling... How much do YOU love the planet?

My council dont take ANYthing from us for recycling because we're in a village. Only the town gets kerbside boxes.

Moonstorm - I'm glad someone agrees :) The excess packaging is pretty irritating, since they won't recycle film or plastic trays.. or even cardboard :(. Also, we've been buying the eco-friendly refill Kenco and soap packs, but then we can't recycle those! Bah, at least if we buy the jars/dispensers they are recyclable. The world's gone mad.

Tainted - We live in York. I understand about the tetrapacks, but they CAN be recycled (I think) so why doesn't the council do it? Also, they can't be confused with normal cardboard because they don't collect that. Sulk

Plus we don't have a recycling box so have to let it pile up in the kitchen.

PLUS (warming to theme) where we used to live one side of the road got recycling and ours didn't. Which makes no sense at all!

Tetrapacks can definitely be recycled, our council takes them. They didn't the first year of our recycling scheme though, so maybe its trickier for them to find places to take them?

Oh we don't live in the same area. I'm a bit disappointed now, I thought I'd found a MN neighbour ! I'm down South lol. At least in my area, the council are tied to using one recycling plant and they set the rules as to what they can recycle, so it's not necessarily a case of the council not wanting to take the tetrapacks, but they literally have nowhere to take them. If you want to complain to the council (and I have in my area) you may well get a response that says something similar to the above.

My reccling guys are super organised... they even come into my garden and collect the box of Tetra Pak cartons I have put aside for reccling elsewhere

Dont think the council have told them they dont recycle Tetra Paks yet

I'm fed up with it.

We have had boxes for kerb side collection for ages. They collect paper/small card; plastic and glass. Excellent.

A few months ago they started on food waste and we got a bin - grim. My kitchen is small and I'm not having festering food on my worktop for up to a week.

Now we have been told that they want to get rid of the perfectly reasonable bins which are sturdy and can be left outside and want to replace with plastic sacks - PITA. People are just going to give up.

We try to recycle as much as we can, but I often wonder what's the point when there are another 200m people being added to the world population every year....

Weren't there loads of threats about watching your bins to check you didn't put anything in that was recyclable?

How would that even be possible with such vague guidelines? Put the time/money/effort into new recycling plants..

I also have clothes which I doubt a charity shop would want but could be put in a clothes bank, nearest one is miles away. Prepared to make the effort, but I don't drive. Same applies for tetra pak recycling. Just can't get there.

They check for certain non-recyclables in my area but inevitably they will miss some. The main offender here are those so-called compostable food bags that aren't actually compostable unless heavily treated.

ooh, yes, it drives me mad when they won't recycle some things.

they'll recycle plastics, but not, like you say, tetrapak cartons, even though they are fully recyclable (being paper with plactic glued on) and tetrapak has recycling facilities that you can send your cartons to.

the council's response?
they're not widley recycled. ie we can't be bothered to pack them up and send them to tetrapak.

We have a box for paper and cardboard, but apparently not OUR paper and cardboard, they collect our neighbours but not ours. As it is newspapers we haven't worked out what we did to offend the recycle collectors in the early days...

Do you shop in a supermarket? If so, then take the stuff the council won't take to the recycling centre. As for Tetrapaks, it's crazy, but the one plant they can be recycled is up in Scotland, which is fine for the people living near it, but it makes it entirely impractical and expensive to send stuff up from say, Devon. I have stopped using them and buy juice, for example in PET cartons instead, which are easy to recycle. Generally with plastic, you can easily recycle bottles but not cartons such as yoghurts and margarine tubs because they are a different type of plastic with different properties. There aren't so many facilities which can deal with this type of plastic.

I feel very strongly that everyone should recycle as much as they can, even if they can only make themselves care by imagining a giant landfill hole near their house.

Ethelina your council sounds crap!

Our council (Durham) are really good about reacycling and take a lot, including tetrapaks and aerosol cans.

The array of bins and containers in our back yard is ever growing, though. We have:

-Black boxes for glass, metal and aerosols
-Green bags for plastic, paper, card and tetrapaks (and we have 2 of them!)
-A blue wheelie bin for garden waste (but not compostable food waste)

• A green wheelie bin for what's left. Some weeks, that's not much.

We also have our own compost caddy which gets periodically emptied into the compost bin, provided free by the council and kept at the bottom of the garden.

Libra, stick yours in the neighbours boxes

Aries, we do shop in a supermarket, but we have to get a taxi back with the shopping and can't afford two taxis per shopping trip.. So we'd be limited in what we could carry to the supermarket (it's quite far).

Regarding cartons, we can't recycle ANY cartons. They just won't take them. Sad, since we drink an astonishing amount of juice.

We do recycle as much as we can, but I feel annoyed that there isn't more that we can recycle, particularly since most IS recyclable, the council just doesn't have the facilities or can't be bothered. Think how many extra jobs you could create by dealing with all of it...

Agree with Nickel, surely they could send things to the tetra pak factory, or work out some kind of shipping method..

I have been wondering what 'widely recycled' means (convinced it's a lie on some packaging!) and found this:

?Widely Recycled? means 65% of people have access to recycling facilities for these items.
?Check locally? means 15% - 65% of people have access to recycling facilities for these items.
?Not recycled? means less than 15% of people have access to recycling facilities for these items.

What does access mean? Kerbside, or within x miles?

fair enough - but if things are not "widely recycled" quite often it's because councils haven't bothered - they say it's not widely recycled, so it becomes so, becuase the council won't put anything in place so that they can be.

like the tetrapak thing - councils won't sort their neck out, so noone recycles them!

oh, yeah, and if they agree to send stuff, the more they send, the cheaper it is to send it, and it might mean that more recycling centres can be set up.
but if noone bother,s then it looks like noone wants to

Ariesgirl - our council will recycle yoghurt pots.
they're usually made with polystyrene.

all plastics have to have a little triangle with a number in it, telling you what it's made of.

if it's got a 7 in the triangle, then it's harder to work out what's in it, and harder to recycle (it means "other plastic"

I'll try to find the list....

here we go, this is a good site
you have to scroll through it, but it's got examples too

I reckon my council think we're all too thick to deal with the complicated bits of recycling, like looking for the triangle with the number in it. So, we can recycle "plastic bottles" but not any other shapes made out of the same plastics as the bottles are.

And we can recycyle "garden waste" but not potato peelings etc from the kitchen. Actually, in fairness, we were allowed to put those in for the first year, then they stopped, so perhaps they have evidence that we are too thick after all