To be horrified at how much waste we produce but think food producers are to blame?

[malificent7]

Dp, dd and I live here ft. Dsd lives here pt. Our bins were collected on Wednesday and already on Sunday the recycling and wheelie bin are full again.
Main culprits are bulky plastic milk containers, things like mushroom cartons, pepsi/ fizzy water bottles..cardboard packaging etc.

However, the council only collect wheelie bins every 3 weeks. I think the reasoning behind this is that peopke will ve forced to recycle more. Great in theory. In practice many things can't be recycled.
Really i think food companies need to think of alternative ways of packaging food...quite what i don't know.

It’s very poor. Supermarkets making things cheaper to buy in plastic annoys me so much. We’re lucky to have a milk vending machine near by which reduces the bulky milk cartons but it is much more expensive.

All the main culprits you’ve listed can be recycled though can’t they? I put all of those in the recycling bin. It’s our landfill bin that usually has hardly anything in, just cellophane really.

The problem is that the companies making plastic have a huge interest in pushing the plastic problem onto consumers. If they keep pushing the idea that the responsibility is on the general public to dispose of it and local authorities to sort recycling out then the big companies who make a fortune from plastic packaging don't have to change what they're currently doing.

In Texas one town banned single use plastic bags and the plastic lobby took the case to court and spend thousands getting the ban overruled. There's a lot of money in plastics.

Can you not order extra recycling bins? Our council lets us have 2.

Most stuff can be recycled though. What are you putting in the bin?

I live on my own now, but having started doing my own hot compost for food waste (also handy for other non recyclable things like that very thin sort of wooden box) I now produce one bag of non recyclable stuff every two weeks. Everything like milk bottles is crushed and then put in the recycling.

We can have as many recycling bins as we like. But the council won't take accept many items which are capable of being recycled. And will only take the wheelie bin every 3 weeks. Which is no good when you have a family of 6. So, while I think food producers could do a lot more, so could the council, who are rinsing me for tons of council tax and providing fewer services every year!

Main culprits are bulky plastic milk containers, things like mushroom cartons, pepsi/ fizzy water bottles..cardboard packaging etc.
YANBU on the supermarkets needing to make changes. However, much of that you could cut out by switching to milk delivery in glass bottles and buying a bottle of fizzy drink only occasionally. We do end up with a couple of mushroom cartons a week, and strawberry or grape ones if we buy those.

If you love fizzy drinks too much to give them up you may want to consider a Sodastream

You are buying too much stuff, or at least not squashing plastic bottles etc before putting them in the recycling bin.
4 of us here, & 4 weekly collections would be fine as our bins are never more than half full every fortnight

I know not everyone else can do this but I have a hot composter for food and garden waste.

I grow most of my own veg through summer and the rest of the time buy from the weekly vegetable market stall near my work, who still put it in paper bags.

Meat I bulk buy in meat boxes or the butchers and deep freeze

I bake (for dietary reasons more than anything) which means we don't really have issues with wrappers.

Cardboard, glass, tins and most plastic gets recycled in the the twice weekly recycling. We squash it down really hard.

I deliberately make choices to buy stuff in recyclable packaging if there is a choice. I have a vast range of funky reusable bags stashed everywhere and a crate in the car to unload shopping straight out of the trolly into.

I'm not an eco nut by any stretch of the imagination but I try to do the least harm I can where it's within my power and doesn't add extra stress to my life.

It would be INCREDIBLY helpful however if supermarkets did away with pointless non recyclable plastic packaging. No one died from not having their bananas or apples in a plastic bag.

I agree but I think the main, number one problem is the way we treat out rubbish. It is far far to easy to put it out of our minds.
I fill up a bin in the kitchen every day, then dump it out the back in a bigger bin, then every week a truck comes around to pick it up and I can forget all about it and pretend it never happened. It’s someone else’s problem then.

I was visiting Portugal a few years back and we had to take all our rubbish to the centre of the town, where we put in into bins and it went underground into huge skips and was collected from there every week instead of collecting form the houses. Even making the job a small bit harder, having to drag the bag down the stairs and across town, made me really think about the rubbish. And also to see how much the town was contributing to the pile made me very aware of what I was doing.

Sorry for the long winded reply, but I think it’s easy to put it out of our minds with the current bin collection system. Once it is gone out of the house, nobody cares where it is gone or thinks about it.

Just been to Scotland. They don’t seem bothered about recycling like Wales. Shocking.

Plastic covered cucumbers the most pointless plastic around

Everything is bagged in plastic its irritating I used to buy mushrooms and refuse to bag them they would try and bag them at the checkout I didnt WANT a bag 😤 so annoying

Surely your fizzy drinks bottles and milk cartons can be recycled? As can cardboard and our council take the mushroom and fruit punnets as long as they are not brown plastic.

I think it’s a mix of producers and consumers.

I blame supermarkets and producers for things like mushrooms in plastic cartons - they need to move en masse back to paper bags - and consumers need to get over the odd bruised mushroom being fine.

But Pepsi? I’m not sure about plastic vs glass bottles. It’s quite complex re increased logistics environmental cost of heavier glass bottles. Washing cost vs recycling. I don’t know which is better. But unlike your mushrooms, it’s a product that has to go in a bottle. So that’s on the consumer. If you think it’s wrong that fizzy drinks generate so much waste, examine your own conscience as to why your bin is full of them.

A lot of the plastic used can’t be recycled as it’s film and so non-recyclable. I guess COVID has made people more cautious, as I’m sure mushrooms used to be available in paper bags.

A lot also says ‘check local policy’ (or similar). The Times did this a couple of years ago; one of their journalists rang several LAs to ask…none of them knew. He also pointed out how daft it was to have things like shampoo bottles and spray cleaners where the tops are made of different plastic to the actual bottle, but with some it’s impossible to separate them.

An awful lot of the plastic we "recycle" isnt recycled though, is it? It's shipped to places like Turkey and dumped.

How about the UK governments enact a law outlawing the export of plastic waste? Let's get our own house in order.

Our recycling bin does get filled up every two weeks, our general waste bin doesn’t. Our council will allow pretty much all plastic in the recycling bin, it makes me think it’s not actually being recycled as there is so little they won’t take. I don’t believe the council where I live has better recycling facilities than most others, my mum came to visit recently and was surprised that we can put margarine tubs and yogurt pots in ours when her council have them listed as not acceptable.

I agree about the supermarkets though, I’ve noticed lots of promises about recycling and returning plastic wrapping to be recycled but having worked in a supermarket I know that mixed waste ends up in with this stuff and it then can’t be recycled so it’s just a load of empty promises, would be better to just do away with it as much as possible. I think it was on one of the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsall programmes about plastic a few years ago that there was a suggestion of making the packaging for mushrooms out of cauliflower leaves instead of the plastic tubs. Never heard anything else about it though.

I’m stating the obvious here, but you’re crushing the plastic bottles right?

Regarding the black wheelie bin I feel exactly the same. 3 weekly collection here too, and so much that is recyclable that they just won’t take. Our local tip had brilliant recycling facilities, most now closed. Not due to Covid, just council cutbacks. They recycled juice cartons, soft plastic, carrier bags etc. All stopped.

No public garden waste/glass/plastic collection points anymore. There’s much more but I don’t want to derail into general council shitness

I also now avoid Volvic water on principle. At the height of the plastic problem awareness they chose to change their packaging for cases of water (I’m in retail) from cardboard to plastic wrap

Sorry, needed a small rant!

I really hate this new thing l keep seeing: ‘recycle with bags at larger stores.’
I don’t shop at any ‘larger stores’ nor live near any.
Recyclable stuff gets wasted this way but the companies can pretend they’re being environmentally friendly. Smaller branches should either take this recycling or should not be allowed to sell products that their customers can’t recycle kerbside.

Yes this is a huge problem

We were pretty hot on recycling, I drink a lot of sparkling water, have a soda stream. We all use Chilies bottles, recycle as much ccs as we can. I'm in a test area that will take any plastic, I sought it actually gets recycled.

Then Covid, the amount of plastic shut in the LFTS in a family of teachers is horrendous. We are at a uk beach town at the moment, plastic straws, plastic cups etc. We're
Going backwards.

I agree OP.
I have decided just this week to move over to a fruit and veg delivery box and buying meat from the farm shop which has less packaging. I'm going to look in to milk delivery as well.

Meat seems to be the worst - things like mince in a packet which is about 80% large than the product it holds. Takes up loads of room in the fridge and loads of plastic to get rid of.

I agree with PPs suggestion of a sodastream, we love ours and it means no plastic bottles going in the bin. The other thing we swapped was detergent and fabric softener to a delivered version with zero plastic waste.

Terracycle will recycle some hard to recycle things for free- you just need to sign up
www.terracycle.com/en-GB