To inwardly rage against people who won't recycle

[siblingrevelry]

My dad told me that his neighbours either side have told him they 'can't be bothered' to recycle as per the new scheme in the area, and will just continue putting everything into their main bin.

It pisses me off that people are seemingly allowed to opt out of this public duty. I am very environmentally aware, although i realise that scraping shit off babie's nappies is a step too far for lots of folks, but why should I and many others bother washing tins, squashing plastic and taking out the recycling when others don't?

I appreciate that the jury is still out on global warming, but there is no denying that the physical space this stuff takes up in landfill affects us all.

Lazy, lazy, lazy!

I do recycle most things, but after my DF informed me that the council offices where he works are sending tonnes of plastic coke type bottles to the landfill (as they have too many) I am a bit

If I'm double-wrapping all of my food waste, isn't that just wasting plastic bags?

And chicken bones and orange peel smells pretty funky if they're left in a bin bag for two weeks, especially at the height of summer.

I recycle religiously because I'm incredibly lazy. Bulky packaging takes up precious space in the kitchen bin. I hate changing the kitchen bin.

I must be missing something - Why would you keep food waste in the kitchen for 2 weeks? Surely it would be in a closed bin outside?

It's not obvious that recycling is doing any good. It is tedious, the boxes and bins multiply every year and take up space looking untidy

How 'obvious' do you want it to be that not using up more and more finite resources is a good thing for the future of the planet? As for the untidiness, I reckon it's small fry compared to the 'untidiness' of landfill.

main thing is to use less. If you've got kids and you are using too much and not recycling, you are sticking two fingers up at them.

BTW a food caddy should not get maggoty if you are only putting in it what you should; peelings and tea bags. If anything else is going in you are wasting food.

Uh, orange peel does smell when it's sat at the bottom of a bin for two weeks.

And I can't double wrap it and take it outside to the recycling bin because the bin wouldn't be collected! Our brown bins aren't collected if there's any plastic in them, and I am not standing outside before work unwrapping rotten orange peel from plastic bags to recycle them, sorry.

What about for those of us who don't have an outside?

I don't get how the 'closed bin' outside thing would work, even if you do have an outside. Do you mean that every time you want to put a bit of orange peel in the bin, you go outside with it, untie the bin bag, put the peel in and then tie it up again? Do people really do that?

Why don't you have an outside?
Houses have bins outside - Flats have communal bins - outside?

We have to pay for our own special "compostable" bags for the food bin. I find they start to sweat and leave the bin smelly within a week. But the solution is to line the bin with newspapers, and if I'm putting in something wettish (e.g. the bones after making stock) I add some scrunched up newspaper inside the bags as well.

Then the lazy swines bin men don't empty the whole thing into their lorry, they just pick out the bags, (with their hands! ach-y-fi) and leave the soggy newspaper behind. Despite all the blurb TELLING you that using newspaper to line the bins will stop the smells.

We now have a single lidded bin for almost all non-food recyclables, and I find it hard to believe that the paper in most bins is clean enough to be useful.

However, I still think it behoves us to do our best, and campaign for better collections, lidded boxes etc. AND clearer instructions and explanations of how (and where) it is sorted.

Our recycling isn't too bad in Glasgow.

Green bin (landfill) & Brown bin (garden) are picked up fortnightly

Blue (card paper plastic cans) & purple (glass) are also fortnightly on alternate weeks to the other two.

We get liners for the kitchen caddy & a bigger bin to put the food waste in outside, so the caddy gets emptied into that daily so it doesn't stink the house up. That's picked up weekly. We don't need to wash stuff out unless its messy.

I don't have an outside. Our flat door leads directly onto the street in the middle of town, you probably wouldn't even realise it was the door to a home tbh.

We don't have a bin collection because of this which is a massive pisstake.

Moving soon (yay!) and will be recycling then.

I posted, but it's disappeared.
So OP and others with sanctimonious views, do you get it now?

I do recycle. But gave up on food waste because of the stink on summer.

Plus, I am totally unconvinced it does ANY good.

But for many, poor collections, the stink, the sending our recycling to landfill anyway?
Can you dispute this?
Myth if this global warming , if you recycle .... Any evidence for this ?
And it is send to Asia.
And so it's all a bit pointless.
But you are angry if someone doesn't recycle.

I chuck anything that has a recycling badge on it into our blue bin, along with paper, tins & glass - great! A while ago they were complaining that we should only put class 1, 2, 3 etc. plastic in, but it all went in anyway.

Always used to do glass, but if they didn't have this kerbside collection I wouldn't bother.

I'm never convinced that they actually do anything with it anyway, having seen a couple of programs where it just gets shipped to India for them to burn/sell/reclaim.

I'm dubious about most "green" initiatives TBH, especially the ones that raise taxes, but I'd gladly go back to weekly collections for normal household waste....

Food rubbish goes in the normal bin. I won't collect rotting food in my kitchen.

Why not? Buy a solid food crock with a lid and a charcoal filter . If, like mine, your council provided you with a woefully inadequate container, I agree it's irritating if they've spent money on something useless, but it's not actually logical to expect free indoors containers for it anyway, let alone fantastic ones. After all, no one expects the council to provide them with a normal indoors wastebin.

And isn't your 'normal' bin inside, anyway?

Yabu, I do not have time or space to collect for recycling.

How does it take more time or space? You merely spend the time you would spend putting the item in the waste bin putting it in a recyclying bin instead. And if you recycle, you have less regular waste, so need a smaller regular bin, so save space that can then be used for recycling containers...

These are 'dog ate my homework' excuses!!!

YANBU. Why do you think "the jury is still out" on climate change, though? It isn't. Don't believe the Daily Mail.

Its easy here, all mixed and can be bagged in a recycling bag and left out with the weekly rubbish collection. Different lorries come the same morning. I just have a big clean bin outside the back door and get the kids to bag it up once a week.

I only do this however as it saves me emptying the kitchen bin all the time, its a total waste of time environmentally when they are building new coal fired power stations every day in China, and recycling is sent to landfill half the time anyway.

I also refuse to recycle food after a particularly unpleasant evening with 10 bottles of value bleach and a sea of maggots. I did recycle food waste over winter though until my council decided that brown bin collections stop mid October until April.
I do recycle plastics etc into my blue bin, but food and general waste goes into the grey. I don't buy newspapers or magazines so nothing to recycle there either.

I love the blue bin scheme though, before we had this DH would have to literally climb into the bin to stomp down the waste but now we split between the two, even though collections are fortnightly we manage much better and rarely need to do the 'bin dance'.

YABU - I live in a flat and don't have room for loads of separate bags. It doesn't really bother me, tbh - chances are that if the planet goes tits-up, I will be long gone by then!

To people complaining they have to pay for the compostable liners - you have to buy your own normal bin bags too, but no one complains about it.

And to people complaining about the logistics, please follow these steps:

1. Keep food caddy on kitchen worktop, lined with compostable bag and scrape food scraps into it. One with a charcoal filtered lid will not smell at all (until you lift lid off, but so would a normal bin with food in...)
2. When it is full / getting overly icky/ due for collection (whichever is sooner) tie the top, remove, and place outside in your kerbside collection container.
3. Replace with new caddy liner and repeat.
4. If it decomposes too quickly at bottom, change more regularly, line bottom with paper, or double bag before taking outside.

How hard....?

My ILs barely recycle anything and it gives me the rage. They have all the relevant bind but just can't be arsed. Lots of students round here don't recycle either and seeing all the recyclable rubbish poking out of their stuffed full black bins on bin day gives me the rage. YANBU.

It doesn't really bother me, tbh - chances are that if the planet goes tits-up, I will be long gone by then!

Yeah, probably thanks to people like you thinking the planet's sole purpose is for your own pleasure and benefit, rather than it being their duty to look after it not just for future human generations but all living creatures and also because it's not ours to destroy. We are guests who, although we owe everything to the planet and other living things on it, sadly wield terrible power over it and them. We should use that power as far as we can to behave like custodians, not gate-crashers.

I don't drive a car, I have never flown, and I live on my own and buy stuff as I need it - I hardly think I am personally responsible for global warming!

I live in a flat we have communal bins, i don't recycle anymore as people chuck whatever they like into each bin so its not able to be recycled and to be honest why should i be washing out tins and taking them down 4 floors to put in a bin that other people put their dog shit in.