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!

Recyclable liners are all well and good assuming your bin men have any common sense. Unfortunately ours see it as a 'foreign object' and refuse to take the bin. When thats happened a few times you tend to think bollocks to it and just not bother anymore.

Food waste is covered in bleach tied into a carrier bag and binned in the grey bin.

I'd be interested to see the offset of carbon emissions by traipsing to the rubbish dump when the council won't collect compared to the good done by the recycling?

I carefully sort the stuff into the various boxes, because I'm so law abiding I was 45 before I got my first parking ticket. However, I'm not naive enough to think it doesn't all go into the same landfill anyway.

I don't see why food has to sit in the kitchen for two weeks. We have a small bin that sits on the work top with compostable liners. When it's full we tie it up and put it in the food bin outside which has a lockable lid. Maybe councils do things differently. We also have weekly collections for everything.

Just to add we only have council collections of paper and glass. Anything else has to be done on a personal level which a lot of people simply can't do.

Could you come around here and outwardly rage at dh. He just doesn't seem to get it so I end up fishing empty milk bottles out of the bin while you are at it though a rage at the council for not providing kerbside glass recycling would help too!

our council is very good in this area.

• food waste every week
• and an alternating collection of recycling one week and non recyclable rubbish the next

I don't understand how anyone gets maggots in the bin if their food is collected every week.

Our food bin isn't collected every week. That's how. Although it's only happened to us once.

We recycle, my problem though is my husband would recycle me and the kids given half a chance he becomes completely obsessive if he is not reined in and we end up with a shed full of 'recyclible' rubbish because it is not the type councils collect. I am willing to bet in my obsessive husbands eyes even you are unreasonable.

Unless you're going to stop population growth then it is futile. Even if you could halve the output of waste from each person then the next time the population doubled you'd be back where you started.

Recycling and all the stuff about carbon footprints is about lots of noise and fuss so no one will notice that we are doing nothing useful at all. It actively helps politicians to avoid facing the problem and helps them get re-elected.

our kerbside collection takes nearly everything - glass, batteries, clothes, cardboard, tetra pak, plastic, paper, foil. Food waste goes in the brown bin but its only collected fortnightly.

I do the recycling as I'm asked because they make it so easy. On the downside, it means two full size wheelie bins, a food caddy, and three huge plastic boxes, so if I didn't have a garden and a huge garagd to store it all, I think I might not find it so pleasant.

Our council has just started food waste recycling - we've been given an indoor caddy and outdoor bin, and the council supplies compostible liners. So far it is working reasonably well, but I am somewhat concerned at stories of the bins smelling during hot weather. Though the food waste bin is collected weekly, and the ordinary bins only fortnightly, so that might make smell issues better.

I don't agree with woozlebear that saying one doesn't have enough space to recycle is a 'the dog ate my homework' type excuse. If your council is one of those that insists on lots of different boxes for glass, tins, paper, food etc, and you only have a small home, and little or no outside space, it could be very hard to find space for it all.

We are lucky - we can put glass, paper, cardboard, plastics and tins all in the one bin - but even so, we have the ordinary wheely bin, the recycling wheely bin, an garden waste wheely bin and the food waste caddy - and that takes up a lot of space.

I do wonder how the waste is all sorted, and how green all the rinsing and cleaning of tins etc is. I do my best to save the packaging/tins etc when I am cooking, and rinse them at the end of the washing up, but other bottles etc needing rinsing have to be rinsed in clean water - and as all the water in our taps is clean, drinking water, I am not how to avoid using it (as TheBigJessie does).

Maybe she keeps all her recycling and rinses it at the end of the washing up, but I don't think that would work in every household. I don't have enough worktop space to keep all the tins and bottles etc out of the reach of a Labrador and a lab-pointer cross, both of whom like to scavenge for food - I would be forever retrieving packaging from their beds! And as ddog2 had to have £450-worth of emergency surgery less than a fortnight ago, when she ate a bottle cap that caused an intestinal obstruction, I don't want to leave anything like that in their reach!

Unless you're going to stop population growth then it is futile.

The UK has stopped population growth. Without massive immigration 2000 onwards, the UK population would be dropping by about a quarter of a million per year, with TFR at about 1.6. It's only about 1.9 (ie, below replacement) now. Italy, Spain and Germany have a TFR of about 1.5 and dropping. Predictions in the 1960s had the UK population at 75m by 2000, when in fact it was less than 60m. The population increase of around 3m over the last ten years is entirely due to immigration and the higher fertility rate of those immigrants during those 10 years (mostly, before I'm accused of racist tropes, because immigration is disproportionately adults of child-bearing age). Given that the essentially uncontrolled immigration of 2000-10 is unlikely to happen again, population in the UK will be stable or falling over the next fifty years.

food waste never stinks in our house. But it is only tea bags, banana skins and vegetable peelings. We eat everything else.

We are asked to wrap food waste in newspaper, which helps keeps bins clean.

If I had to throw out meat or fish that had gone off, I would freeze it and not bin it until the day before the bin is collected (fortnightly)

Mind you we are charged 8 euro here (Ireland) every time we put out a general waste bin, while recycling is technically free.

Technically only because we also pay an annual bin charge which runs into hundreds.

The councils like to call this encouragement to recycle. Some people call it by other names.

I recycle but I don't have confidence that it does much good. Have heard that they don't have the resources to actually recycle everything. Some ends in landfill and some ends up being shipped to third world countries.

we generally try to recycle however it feels like a complete waste of time because the council have admitted they put most of it to landfill or burn it at a local incinerator. the reason for dumping it is it is so expensive to recycle and use its not worth doing it.

friday16 I was thinking world-wide rather than just here as it is not a local problem.

I think you are being overly optimistic about immigration in the UK and the knock on effect of larger family size amongst immigrants. I'd like you to be right, but I seriously doubt it.

We're not allowed to use paper/kitchen towel to line our kitchen caddies or compostable bags, and the outside compostable bin into which the caddy liners are put when full is only collected fortnightly. We're also not allowed to line that outside bin with paper/card either. There is simply no way to avoid all smells from either container, though it is much, much worse in the outside bin and in summer. I suppose I don't really mind using the caddy as such, but in summer it only takes leaving the lid open for a minute or two for a fly to lay eggs and then you've got an infestation within a day or so. The other big issue for us is that as I said upthread, our council ration the number of liners we're allowed and you absolutely cannot use your own under any circumstances as they will not take the bin if you do. Three infractions and they suspend all your collections for a period of three months. It averages out to just under three liners a week. Now, we can fill one liner for sunday lunch alone in terms of veg peelings and meat bones (we're allowed to put any and all food waste of any description in) as the liners and accompanying caddy are very small. So I can't use a fresh liner every day which would be my ideal, or if I do, I can only recycle food waste three days a week. And either way, it doesn't change the fact that the outside bin is only collected fortnightly.

I'm not averse to recycling, I'm really not, but our council's food waste policy could ceretainly be improved to encourage more recycling. A weekly collection and no bag rations and I wouldn't have a problem with it at all.

I was thinking world-wide rather than just here as it is not a local problem.

Hypothesis: consumption is inversely proportional to family sizes. Countries with higher TFRs have lower energy and resource consumptions, and therefore less to recycle.

The EU-27 TFR is 1.59, for example.

Evidence: here

The global replacement TFR is 2.33. Only two countries (Saudi Arabia and Israel) have both a high per-capital GDP and also a birthrate above this level.

So the countries with stuff worth recycling are in population decline.

I don't understand how anyone gets maggots in the bin if their food is collected every week

Fortnightly here as well, one week grey bin, other week blue and brown food bins. It just doesn't work in the summer heat. Brown is great for garden waste but not food, its just not collected regularly enough.

If I had to throw out meat or fish that had gone off, I would freeze it and not bin it until the day before the bin is collected

I have 2 freezers. Every week is like Tetris when the shopping comes so there is no way that would even be remotely possible. Aside from that why should we have to freeze rotting food to avoid maggots because a council can't successfully organise a recycling scheme?

Thanks for all the replies.

I'm totally with those of you without bins/no cars/no kerbside collection. If you're prepared to do it if it's made easier then I can sympathise.

Those of you who are proud of not recycling, and don't care because you won't be around when the planet implodes should be ashamed of you attitudes. I'll bet you're the type of anti-social fuckers who think it's ok to park on zig zags outside school, or park in parent and child spaces without kids. As long it's not illegal, you think it's ok for you to break the rules, and sod everyone else who is mug enough to be considerate of others!

I only have a letterbox freezer as part of an undercounter fridge Juice!

However the alternative for me is putting gone off fish for example in the general waste and paying 8 euro to have that collected that week.

If we had a weekly brown bin collection I would be more than happy to do it. As I say I already use the blue for tins/bottles/plastics etc so using the brown wouldn't be a problem. It's just the frequency of the collection and the fact it stops over winter.

I do have a small recycling scheme for food leftovers such as meat and fish though, a small family of foxes who greatly enjoy and bits thrown up the garden at night.