Till receipts aren't recyclable - am i the only one who didn't know?!

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Sorry for being boring but I'm annoyed I've only just found this out!

It's to do with the type of paper they're printed on.
Did anyone else know this?! I feel like it should be communicated better. Would definitely encourage me to say no to them more than I do at present!

One of the park cafes where I go to when I mentioned recyclable cups/plates he complained about this (cost?) but then brought in a cardboard cup with lid as well as polystyrene ones. The other local cafes some in parks make a big thing of their cups being recyclable.

I suppose there’s big business for this. I get slightly irritated at eg Cathedral City cheese as that packaging is only Terracycle recycled. On some packaging it says recycle bags at large supermarkets yet when I was at boyfriend’s house who gets bags of salads, one in four bags were recycled at the large supermarket yet they were the same bags to look at!

Well done Costa (never thought I’d say that!).

News to me.

I didn't know.

I've put them in paper recycling for years and years.

I've read my council's recycling guide and it isn't mentioned as something to exclude.

Half the problem with recycling is that we have hundreds of different councils each making their own rules for it. What a waste of manpower. And confusing for people. It's pretty weird moving between councils. Like you've moved abroad or something! Years ago, we had a black bin for non recyclable waste. Moved to another council and there were no waste bins at all. You had to put stuff in sacks. Now we are back to having black bins!

Get yourself on Dragon's Den!

A lot of people also don't wash stuff before they put it into recycling ♻️ and will argue all day long that it's not required. Yet one unwashed item (unless the lid is on correctly & tightly) will cause the entire load to go into general waste

Grease! It cannot be recycled if there's even a tiny little splatter of grease

@Restrelief My mum discovered that Lidl had charged her for 31 hand creams recently when she'd bought 3! Always check your receipt!

My council says clean cardboard. Used pizza boxes are rarely clean!

Did she not notice how much she was paying at the till?!

I wonder if the boxes from the fish &chip shop are also not suitable for recycling.

How can they be; they’re a greasy mess.

I think people get over zealous sometimes. A friend of mine puts used paper kitchen towel pieces in her recycling bin. Pointless.

These would rarely be clean. My council does provide a list downloadable from their website and these are expressly forbidden.

Pringles tubes is something I see in paper recycling bins when I walk and they can't be recycled.

Although there are recycling bins in Tesco car parks which do Pringles tubes and things like passata containers.

Nothing. They just want to minimise the amount of contamination but the processes have a tolerance for a degree of contamination. So the odd bit of greasy cardboard doesn’t matter as long as everyone is not dumping huge amounts of greasy cardboard in the recycling.

Found it out a while ago along with black plastic bags (I winced at both, have definitely put both in there!)

I heard from two sources (radio, podcast) that some grease on a pizza box or similar is OK, but no "3D" remains - i.e. lumps of cheese etc.
Bottom line is the cleaner, the better.

I had no idea but I don't usually bother to recycle small bits of paper anyway.

I think you can’t really expect refuse collectors to check pizza boxes. Which is why some councils have blanket bans.

I work for the LA in environmental services, for recycling bins they open the bin and inspect visually. Any obvious contamination they red tag and it doesn’t get emptied. They do not rummage. It’s against the health and safety policy there could be sharps or anything in there. It’s also why they don’t pick up loose bags/ excess waste anymore and only empty bins.

😬

Good thing we rarely eat them now but um... yeah ...

EDIT - I've just checked my local council. Why can't I put pringles in if I can do these?

• food and drink cartons.
• aerosols.
• Clean kitchen foil and foil trays (please clean off any food residue)

Why does it matter if they are recyclable? I keep some for safety (i.e. want to take something back) and bin others, or use them to start fires (we have four open fires and three need paper to start). Paper, recyclable or not, is a lot better than plastic.

I thought it was common knowledge. Seems not.

I am very surprised at how varied recycling collections are from area to area!
Ours is a mixed bin: paper, aluminium, bottles and no idea what else is allowed or not.
I imagine they have a sorting place somewhere to separate materials by hand.
Also, glass and pretty much everything would be washed and treated with some sort of chemicals to remove labels, glue residue, dirt.
I can't imagine tiny bits of paper would be sorted and treated with paper general items.
Yes, it would be lovely to send immaculately clean items to recycling but the water and energy used at home dilutes the whole process in terms of how green this process is.
I also suspect they can't recycle at least half of items from a standard household bin.
We probably need more education because not everything is as green as it seems.
I am dreaming of a day when packaging from supermarket bought items is reduced by 2/3.

Great attitude! Do you not believe in climate change either?!

Well I’ve never heard this and I just put them in, zero problems in a decade or more of recycling. I assume so many people put silly things in the recycling they just have a system to remove out the bad stuff. Since they can only be bothered to collect proper rubbish every two weeks now I’m not putting more in there than I have to!!

I didnt know either.. always google search when i learn something new..

Taken from google:

""Up to about four or so years ago, till receipts were printed on special paper and were not able to be recycled. Remember when till receipts were on shiny paper? Thanks to the pressure to recycle, supermarkets and other retailers changed to printing on ordinary paper so now all till receipts can be recycled""

They really need to make recycling processes consistent across the UK. I love to feel like I'm helping by diligently sorting and washing, but then read threads like this and start to question how much waste is actually just going to landfill. I know our local council said it recycles 30% of waste, what's happening to the remaining 70%?!

The problem with Pringle tubes traditionally is they are a multi layered material, Made of plastic, cardboard and metal combined. The original packaging had a foil liner and a metal bottom. This is a challenge at a recycling centre.

One of the things that came out of COP Glasgow was to force manufacturers to accept responsibility for recycling their products. Rather than shunt all the responsibility on to consumers.

This is why milk carton lids have had the colours removed so they can be recycled with the carton, same with small drinks bottles with the attached lids. Pretty sure Pringles have / are launching a recyclable all cardboard version.