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!

eat it up you slack mother you

Duck - ours collects everything. They treat it and sell it back as compost.

I don't know how widespread that it, but it's very good. And no more stinky bins - we fill a tiny black bag a week with non-recyclables. Also now food waste goes in secure boxes we don't get foxes and gulls ripping rubbish bags, chucking stuff all over the street.

Still a few refueniks even here though, which baffles me.

I have three words for you all:
waste disposal unit

My parents have always had one, we had one at the old house and having to manage without one in the new house (DH is waiting for some parts so he can install the second hand one he got on ebay) is driving me CRACKERS

You can put almost all your food waste down it apart from fats & bones and they are potentially very energy-sustainable

and our council don't collect food waste.

and finally - where we used to live the only recycling box that the council would collect was glass and plastic. You were expected to recycle everything but had to take it all to the recycling points. Which, for us, were right the other end of the town and involved a 6 mile round trip.
Where we have moved to you can put all your recyclables in one green bin, the glass in box and the rest in the normal bin. So I now recycle dutifully whereas at the old house I got fed up with bags of recycling taking up the precious little space we had waiting for there to be enough to justify the round trip to the tip and just stuck everything in the black bin.

Something I can never understand is why food manufacturers are not penalised for over packaging their products. Why is it necessary for the pack of macarons I bought from M&S yesterday to have a plastic inner box and and cardboard sleeve ? Why could they not have just printed the information on the plastic box ?

HardFaced, the Courtauld Commitment has had great success reducing amounts of packaging, there is a long way to go though.

Yes I really think shop packaging needs to change.
Why are people rinsing their stuff out? I wash up then chuck the recycling stuff in there to soak

I recycle but I never wash out things like milk bottles/ shower gel bottles/ ketchup etc, I just chuck them in the plastic recycling bin. How bad is this, I think if I had to wash stuff out I probably wouldn't recycle half as much?!

Does everyone else wash their things before recycling?

Why is it necessary for the pack of macarons I bought from M&S yesterday to have a plastic inner box and and cardboard sleeve?

Because M&S customers buy it?

I used to be like this until the council mistakenly did a recycle aware education thing were they told me that they chuck away most of the recycling they get - as the recycling picker people at the plant only pick out the good stuff

so even if you do wash all your shit - they chuck it into the back of a fuck off lorry - and if one person hasn't rinsed out their shitty tins and coke cans and it gets all over everything then it gets chucked

also what really fucks me off - I mean REALLY is that we are given tiny fucking recycling bin and fuck off black bin

tiny recycle bin gets emptied every fortnight and black bin weekly.

surely if they did recycle collection weekly, this would encourage more people to do it as there would be no other way of getting rid of their shit

waste disposal units as bad for the environment. they use a lot of water (which will affect everyone in your area if reservoirs run out)

I think they are bad for the sewers as well. like the fat mountain they found.

personally they seem like dated technology, like petrol with lead.

Friday, I bought it because I wanted the contents, not the packaging. Had there been a packaging-lite version next to it, I would have bought that

But since packaging costs money, presumably M&S figure that, overall, they make more money with the packaging as it is than otherwise. If they could reduce the packaging cost and still sell as much for the same price, they'd be in there as quick as you like.

It might be that printing on plastic is expensive, so they print the labelling, barcodes and product information on cardboard overwrap, but need the plastic box to stop them breaking up in transit. Or sometimes companies buy stuff "white label" from a big factory, in plastic containers, and then put their own branded wrapper around it. What they don't do is deliberately waste money on packaging that they could do without and still sell as much product. Why would they do that?

I always wash my recycling - purely for guilt feelings -

I would not want the seven year old kids sorting our crap in China to have to smell that all the time - obviously they do - as others don't wash theirs....

but it is not my stuff

but i do wonder why we seem to be creating more packaging than is needed, there are so many more 'convenience' things out there now, individually wrapped cakes and biscuits inside a wrapper with a cardboard overlay. individual wipes for loo, sink, dust ... whats wrong with a washable cloth ffs.

Hellmouth where I work, contamination with food is a problem, but affects maybe 5-10% of the recycling, certainly not most of it. Things like textiles and electricals cause problems with machinery but don't spoil other recycling, its really food and liquids that do it. So rinsing things is good, but they don't have to be sparkling clean, just not have any residues in that will go onto other dry stuff when it gets squashed in the dustbin lorry So a bit of dried bean/tomato juice on the inside of a can isn't a problem really, but half a tin of beans would be.

You wouldn't believe what some people put in their recycling. Used nappies, bags of rotting food, even a dead cat. Some poor sod had to pick that off the conveyor belt.

I have one friend who reckoned she had 'no time' to recycle whilst doing a degree as a single parent. She lived round the corner from a supermarket, shopped there every week AND had a car. Would she not have got a 1st had she recycled her own wine bottles? Who knows.

But, YES, her attitude did piss me off greatly! and now the council provides bins I need to ask if she finds it somewhat easier.

It costs councils an awful lot less to recycle waste than it does to landfill or incinerate it.Why would they invest in all the equipment (tens of thousands of boxes, bins, etc) and organise separate collections for recycling, to then pay fives times as much to landfill it all? Just to annoy people?
They wouldn't. They don't. Papers sometimes pick up on incidents where things have gone wrong (for which large fines are paid) and present them as a reason for people not to bother anymore. Makes me MAD I tell you.

We had a live tortoise, Hoof. They called it Merv (MRF) lol

Wheredo that wins - was it alright??! Do you think someone imagined you'd send it off to make hair combs or jewellry?

It was fine
you can only speculate what people were thinking. We've had dead puppies and kittens, multiple puppies on one occasion.

Why would they invest in all the equipment

Because central government told them to. Their heart isn't in it. If it's such a massive saving to recycle, how come Birmingham the largest metropolitan authority in Europe, only does the bare minimum (one box for paper, one box for glass+plastics+metals, undifferentiated) while smaller authorities with time on their hands and money to waste piss about with larger numbers of boxes? Birmingham's huge, so the savings would similarly be huge. They don't bother. Conclusion: because it's not worth the effort, so they're just doing the minimum to avoid sanctions.

So they are collecting paper, card, metals, plastic and glass. Not really the bare minimum - it doesn't matter that they're not all in separate boxes, it will be sorted. Surely it's easier to have fewer really?
And what sanctions are they avoiding? They pay by the tonne. Every tonne recycled saves them money. Every tonne land filled costs them more.