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.

I've never understood that either, surely potatoes are garden waste. What if you grow potatoes??

And that's exactly what I meant about the plastic bottles! They don't care what it's made of, just whether it's bottle shaped!

I assume lots of people didn't understand about what can be composted, and included cooked food waste, teabags which have had the milk added, etc. As I say, they let us include compostable kitchen waste for the first year, and tried to explain what that did and didn't include. But after a year it changed to just garden waste (with long explanation about not including soil, or thick branches). So I'm guessing they had to throw out a lot because of contamination.

You guys can't put food waste in with your garden stuff? Where I live, we put garden and food waste and cardboard in one bin. Only large pieces of cardboard don't need to go in, and these are stacked at the side.

I thought cooked food composted the same as raw food? And teabags too? Tbh I'd have thought you could compost pretty much anything that isn't man made or meat. This site even says nail clippings and hair! (Ew..)

www.ecodyfi.org.uk/waste/compostinguide.htm

Tea bags are fine, but I think you're not meant to compost them if they have been in contact with milk? So, fine if you take the bag out first, but not if you put the milk into the cup while the teabag is still in there.

Really? Will have to look it up, would have thought it was such a small amount it didn't matter. Maybe it just makes a bit of a stink.

Nothing about milk here. Used teabags are acceptable full stop. Cooked and raw meat is fine, same goes for fish. We can also put animal bedding in the food/garden bin (as long as the animal is vegetarian).

Recycling does not come cheap, perhaps you want to pay more council tax- however, I think the polluter should pay and packaging should be returned to where it was purchased, so that the true costs are factored in.

The plastic is the one that has pi**ed me off.

Before, you could recycle type 1 (PET) and type 2 (HDPE). But not the lids from the milk cartons, just the bottles, despite both being HDPE. (I did ask why but the council did not deign to reply.) And since it was by type, I could recycle any packaging labelled as PET, stuff such as strawberry cartons and the like.

Now it's just bottles. I had a sauce bottle labelled as PP, which was never recyclable before and I suspect still isn't, but they'll collect it whilst rejecting all the recyclable non-bottles. Grrr!

we just compost our own - i think the issue with potato is that peelings can grow their own potatoes (oh, yes they can!)

and milk goes off. (and makes it all smell nasty)

Mum our council does the same - i spent ages laughing at the leaflet! especially as when it says plastic bottles, etc, it lists many different plastics bottles!
so they classify a PET bottle the same as an HDPE bottle.
drives me nutty.

teabags, you have to rip open, as the bags don't compost as easily.

YABU - it's not bloody rocket science.

The tetra cartons say that they can be recycled because they can - but there are limited places that can recycle tetra - it's not just card, it's like a plastic mesh or something.

I think that councils say that you can only recycle bottles as if they said that you can recycle plastic numbers 1 &2, people would put all sorts in. And almost all bottles are 1 or 2, so that solves that issue.

Cardboard needs different facilities to paper.

Our council last year was like yours - no cardboard (and the collectors were picky about what CARD they would take ), no plastic aside from bottles. Facilities are changing now though - this year we stuff all recyclind, including recyclable plastics, cardboard and tetra into a wheely bin and they sort at site.

Our council's really good.. we don't have to separate anything, and we can just chuck anything that's recycleable into the recycling bin (and we can have as many of those as we want)

[runs and hides]

I am happy to recycle - you just have to get into a routine about it.

BUT I would like to see a proper packaging tax placed on businesses. This fucks me off majorly, that all the onus is placed on the consumer, when in reality we have very little control over the amount of surplus packaging created.

Pfft - I didn't say it was rocket science, I said they should try and recycle more! And if you read back, we're actually saying they should STOP dumbing it down, like asking for all items of a certain plastic type, rather than simplifying to only bottles. I'm quite happy to check what plastic type my bottle tops are as long as they're labelled, and recycle accordingly.

Agree with your second point, I'm not sure why they're all for monitoring our bins when it's the businesses who produce the packaging. Still, I think they are cracking down on it now.

Wahwah - No I do not want to pay more council tax, but we're talking about making it more efficient. Also, there seems to be a big difference between councils, which shouldn't be the case when most of us pay roughly the same council tax. Plus there's a difference within the cities themselves, where you pay the same amount of council tax!

Totoro - jealous! My boyfriend used to be able to do that when he lived.. just around the corner from where we live now! Grumble..

I think though, that worryingly - they need to dumb it down. I don't think that MN is representative of the people that they are dumbing it down for. I see all sorts of crap when I walk past people's bins.

There is a MASSIVE difference between councils. Here, I can shove everythign in a bin, meaning I waste far less. At my old house, we had to jam in tins and glass (and that was it, nothign more) into a shitty little red box. And if you put something wrong in, the collectors would throw it on the floor.

Doesn't seem fair that there is such disparity around the country.

Nah, you're probably right.

It does make me irritated though, this desire to police the bins, when I would quite happily recycle everything if I could! It's not fair (sound like such a moaner :)) that we are judged for not recycling, yet not allowed to recycle!

Tbh I can't think of anything we use that can not be recycled at all.

Yes - when we got the instructions, I knew that we could recycle numbers 1 & 2 and that they were saying just bottles because of contamination from mass people!FAIL! - I wanted to be allowed to be one of the clever ones, allowed to do it properly!

I think if they want to truly get anywhere with recycling, they're going to have to start collecting everything and sorting it themselves, I know it'd be expensive, but expecting idiots the general public to do it themselves doesn't seem to be working.

YANBU. It's ridiculous that there's a postcode lottery as to whether you get paper/cardboard/plastic etc. taken. Different councils have different excuses for not wanting to take a, b or c, which is also bizarre.

they should send out a leaflet with the triangles and numbers on one side, and the types of things that they might be on the other side.
so that if people don't get the numbers sytem, then they can see from the other side that they can recycle the milk bottle.

(which helps because some plastics don't have the triangles on)

I do think it is bad that it is made so difficult to do something that is so important. I know a lot of people who would love to recycle but have no access to the facilities and others who have had bad experiences with their recycling and now don't do it anymore. I do find it very irritating!!
Liz

There are other ways to be help the environment instead of just sorting out your rubbish in to brightly coloured bins. There are loads of companies which promoted their green credentials such as this environmentally friendly house clearance and recycling company

And lets not forget that a little bit of effort from all of us can help safeguard the future for our children.

I hate recycling. But we're given too much to dispose of. When I was a child, your groceries were put in brown paper bags and the only plastic you had was the carrier bag or wrapping on meat.

Now EVERYTHING is triple wrapped, with a plastic box, a plastic wrapper, etc.

Supermarkets are responsible for all this excess packaging but we get the consequences of disposing of it correctly.

For all the difference it will make anyway. Near as I can tell every time I've been to a less developed country, they make no effort. We're a tiny little island and we'll make no difference unless the rest of the world follws suit, which they probably wont or acant.

In north Herts, we have a brown wheelie bin for compostable waste collected fortnightly. We can dispose of cooked food as well as raw and garden waste as it is heated to a high temperature an mascerated at the plant before being turned into compost which they then sell at nurseries and garden centres! We can wrap waste food, meat, fish, dairy, eggshells, etc in newspaper to put in the bin, and all types of fruit and veg, grass, leaves, cut flowers, weeds, prunings, hedge clippings etc, and also up to 25% of the bin capacity can be cardboard (torn or flattened.) We've used the compost, it's great. I do home compost as well.

Our council will recycle certain plastics, but only if you take them to the recycling centre yourself. Types 1, 2, 5, and 6. It would be helpful if the numbered triangles on packaging were larger, some need a magnifying glass to read them!

They have also increased their cashback for washable nappies from £40 to £50, so are desperate to cut back on landfill.

The downside is having to do more washing up by hand of all the tins, jars, bottles etc, and having to store all the plastic containers and tetrapaks in the garage until I get enough to make a trip to dispose worthwhile.

Our local council doesn't collect glass which is rather irritating. Apparently this is for safety reasons - not sure how other councils are able to but ours isn't.

We have a weekly food waste collection (massive wheelie bin though). This is kitchen waste only, not garden waste, but can include cut flowers. The only time I have put cut flowers in they wouldn't collect it as it had "garden waste" in it. After about 4 calls to get it picked up, with the contents merrily composting away in the heat of the summer, I was told that the website says that cut flowers are ok, but the bin men hadn't been told that.

What chance does the public have if the staff can't apply their own rules?