To tell you that if you don't wash your recycling...

[MrsColon]

...before you put it in the recycling bin, it won't get recycled?

If you don't rinse out cans, containers, bottles etc. they will be rejected and go into landfill.

Not enough emphasis is placed on this in recycling campaigns, and in my experience, the majority of people just don't realise this.

I wash everything that can be washed before it goes in the bin to stop the bin smelling. We have compost and separate food waste bins so our landfill has no food in it. So I wash stuff like a butter packet or sachet of Chinese sauce so that it doesn't make the bin smell.

To be totally honest (and I know this will go down horribly) I really couldn’t care less what gets rejected…and the reason for this is purely selfish as I (like many others) already work hard only to pay through the nose in tax, with council tax there’s no even gesture drop if you recycle correctly (which is something they will make money from) if they were to do this I feel like it would be for the majority of people something they would feel morally obligated to take seriously and would be a great insensitive. Purely from the point of view it feels that in the uk the harder you would the less you get back…

One site says remove food from your pizza boxes and recycle !
At least one council only has one bin for everything and puts it in a machine to separate it !
We make the effort to wash where appropriate and recycle. Then we find our council is just mixing most of it back in general rubbish and burning it !
Our council stopped collecting Pet 1 and other plastics and now Bead Services collects them from my house in different coloured bags.
Then they removed all of the local recycling bins including the foil one, due to people abusing the area and just using it to dump stuff.
I am looking forward to Standardisation !

Was speaking to a recycling guy the other day and he said ALL the rubbish and recycling ends up at the same waste disposal centre and all chucked in together and sent to land fill off red places in Africa and Asia! Tbf that’s not the first time I’ve heard that . A very small portion ends up actually bring reused

I put pizza boxes in the normal rubbish. I do not spend hours washing out plastic bottles, but a rinse for any plastic or glass waste is normal. Paper is just clean packaging, newspapers and cardboard.

Given most recycling doesn't get collected for at least a week why wouldn't anyone make sure it's clean?

I'm no house proud Frau but think of the flies that unwashed recycling attracts. Never mind the poor recycling collection staff that have to put up with your dirty, mouldy recycling!

You only need to adapt your kitchen cleaning/dishwashing regime to include cleaning the recycling for it soon to become routine.

And squash your lightweight plastic containers because it not only saves space in your bin and the Recycling Vehicle but also makes it harder for the wind to blow it around.

Simple stuff really.

YABU it depends entirely on where you live. Look up what needs to be done locally, spouting these generalisms helps no one

I clean everything before it goes in. We are very strict on it.

The ways we recycle aren’t wrong… it’s the fact there needs to be a buffer in the way materials are recycled. It has ALWAYS irked me that to recycle -it is the consumer that has to do the work.. the rinsing the prep..etc. But no one asks how much money the ‘recycling’ companies are making off our backs Nd what the monetary trail is.. I. E. Who
Makes what bases on which activity.

Not here. They don’t care here as it encourages recycling

But we are behind with bins. We still use bin bags and not big bins

Depends on your local authority. Ours will accept unwashed containers as well as washed.. They put can, bottles, plastic through a high pressure rinser so we don't have to.

Our LA takes our recycling to a landfill site, pick it up from us and drive straight there, so it doesn't matter if we wash it or not

Yes but please don’t bother washing it especially. Just rinse it out in the dirty sink water at the end of the pots.

PS and don’t forget - reduce (consumption/waste) and reuse (everything) first! Recycling is largely bollocks anyway.

I'm generally a positive glass half full person, but the more I read threads like this the more down I get.

Recycling really isn't the answer to our problems, but it would be nice if everything that could be recycled was. I say OUR problems, but obviously most people feel like it's someone else's issue to sort out. It doesn't help that there are no standard recycling rules across the entire country. It's confusing for most people, even the ones who want to try and do the right thing. A lot of people assume (with plastic items especially) that if it's got a recycling symbol on it that it can be recycled by their council. People chuck all sorts in and think it will get sorted and separated. Just because something technically can be recycled doesn't mean that your council can/will recycle it 🙄

I'm not shocked to hear that most people don't rinse their recycling. I remember my SIL a few years ago saying "I'm not wasting water rinsing out recycling, I'd rather not recycle at all". I really wish more people cared about this stuff, but unfortunately they don't. Said like a true optimist 😂

Having said all of that there's a good app called scrapp where you can easily check what your council will take for recycling. For those that do care 😉

This isn’t accurate and is not true.

My Council specifically say that plastic items 'can be rinsed' but do not need to be cleaned thoroughly.

And where I live, we cant recycle juice cartons. My parents keep telling me I can(they live in different council area) but I can't.

OP it's not the same for every council.

@RickJames

Our recycling system is slightly different as we have a lot of plastics, packaging stuff and metals go in one bag. The metal gets taken out and the rest gets burnt at a special rubbish furnace (Müllheizkraftwerk) that makes power for the local city. I do give things a rinse though so the bin doesnt get stinky.

In this case it’s better not to wash stuff as anything struck on provides extra fuel, it’s simply wasting water and that potential fuel by washing. All v confusing.

Whats the problem just rinse things at the end of washing up the waters
going down to be chucked anyway ,We use the water from washing salad etc to before chucking it .
The really obvious thing is stop buying processed food and stuff in masses of packing
its our planet we need to teach our kids who to do the right thing

@LaVieestBelleNestCePas

The ways we recycle aren’t wrong… it’s the fact there needs to be a buffer in the way materials are recycled. It has ALWAYS irked me that to recycle -it is the consumer that has to do the work.. the rinsing the prep..etc. But no one asks how much money the ‘recycling’ companies are making off our backs Nd what the monetary trail is.. I. E. Who Makes what bases on which activity.

Where I live we have a garden waste service, which we pay for. The council collects our waste, turns it into compost and then sells it. We're the mugs! Though at the moment we don't have a garden waste collection at all cos covid/Brexit/HGV drivers shortage/any other excuse they can come up with.

We have rubbish collected fortnightly and weekly food waste, paper and card, garden waste and glass/tin/plastic collections. A local school runs a crisp packet collection for recycling. Then when they've got enough it all goes off to wherever they get processed. Our council also has weekly nappy collections. I personally always wash out the recycling because it's gross otherwise and also remember it being a thing when it all started up. It is better to reduce waste first though. I live alone so only need to put most waste out monthly. Food goes out weekly as I don't have anywhere to compost and includes coffee grounds etc. I'm a bit OTT with it and take the tea out of the plastic tea bags as well :)

Also I don't care if councils are making money as that can be put somewhere of use after the years of cutting they've had from central government!

I wipe or give a quick rinse out to the worst stuff. But our council doesn't need you to wash your recycling so I don't.

We recycle soft plastics and batteries at Tesco, electrics at the local tip, there's a local shop that takes plastic hangers and the spray triggers from cleaning bottles. There's a place which reuses bottle tops to make kids play equipment (you have to pay for postage) so I save them in a big box and send them off a couple of times a year.

Very little goes into our grey bin. It's only emptied once every three weeks and it's rarely even half full. This month is the exception as we had to replace an appliance which came packed in expanded polystyrene, which unfortunately does not seem to be recycled anywhere that I can find.

Our council also takes polystyrene in with the glass/tin/plastic bag. Only for the last couple of years :)

@liveforsummer

To the pp who has 'known this for years' perhaps it was the case years ago but our local council now says it's not necessary, they have a state of the art recycling plant that sorts and cleans things so the stuff would all be being cleaned twice that's a lot of water.

We don't have to separate our recycling except the glass. There are no people standing picking through the waste - you'd need hundreds surely for the amount of waste generated by a mid sized city.

Same here. Our local authority does the same. Tells us it's not necessary to wash everything out, as it's all done when it gets there. (To the recycling centre.)

Moreover, as previously mentioned, some refuse collectors dump 7 or 8 households worth of recyclables at a time, (glass/ jars/ plastics/ tins,) into a big bin wheelie bin anyway; and then ditch it all in the back of the wagon. So you could spend half your waking hours meticulously washing and scrubbing everything, just to have it contaminated by other peoples crap anyway!

So the high-and-mighty 'you're scum if you don't wash your recycling' brigade can do one, and take a long walk off a short pier, along with the high-and-mighty vegans, and the judgy eco warriors, who also think they're better than everyone else.

You have no idea what I - or anyone else on here does - for society, charity, our community, our friends, our family, and nature and wildlife. So just bore off with your ranting and judging, and your holier-than-thou attitude.