Friend Doesn't Recycle

[GetDownShepp]

I stayed at a friend's house this weekend and they don't recycle.

Surely I'm not being unreasonable to hope we all do this now?

Isn't this just second nature?

@Needmorelego

we have a communal rubbish area. Sever black (general) wheelie bin & several blue (recycling). The dimwits I share them with are nice people but either stupid or don't give a 💩. I'm not entirely sure which. Despite being given leaflet after leaflet on what can/can't go in the bins they STILL put all manner of crap in the recycling. Clothes, shoes, broken toys, broken appliances. Despite also have lots of 'clothes' bins at the nearby supermarket (walking distance, but they all drive anyway) and despite a user friendly 'tip' )recycling Centre)near by.

they 'contaminate' the recycling so I expect it all goes to landfill, but zi just can't bring myself not to put the recycling in the right bin anyway.

the council keeps talking about the food bins... I hope they don't bring that in here. It would be an absolute nightmare.

At school we have a bin and a green recycling bag in every classroom. The cleaners empty both into the same black bag and chuck them in the big containers.

I dont recycle at all.

I used to work for a large big name company. There were recycling bins on site for the staff to religiously separate and bin their rubbish. Posters on the walls saying what goes where etc. It all got tipped into the same big skip out the back 🤷🏼‍♀️

Well you sort stuff one item st a time so what’s the difference? It takes ten minutes.

I used to know someone who worked for a rubbish collection contractor and she said that a lot of people are just too lazy to do it. They’ll find any excuse not to. Makes my teeth itch.

I don't think I'd be annoyed. Most of the U.K. population takes holidays abroad and have cars. I think it's a bit odd to worry about whether someone recycles in comparison. Not to mention the countries not doing anything about global warming.

YANBU

Half my street don't recycle. Well I assume as only half of us put out the recycling bins. Even less use the food waste bins. My street has rubbish strewn on lawns and lots of vandalism and stuff so it may be the type of person who lives here. I hope most are better

Places that tell you to stick everything into a big skip - no matter how nasty, messy, dirty, sticky - and the recyclables 'all get sorted automatically'. If that is true, why do the council ask us to wash things out? In fact, why tell us to recycle at all, if they can just sort it all for us at the other end anyway? Why do they tell us that contaminated loads have to go straight to landfill, if it can all simply be 'magically' sorted?

My commercial waste collectors at the cottage used to do it this way. It is perfectly possible if the depot is set up to do so. Most council ones are not.

It was nice and simple. We had one big wheelie bin that was collected once a week.

Now the idiots in the Welsh parliament have decreed that this is not good enough. We now have 4 large wheelie bins (lucky it's not 5 but we don't need to have a separate food waste collection). Instead of 1 visit, we now have to have a separate wagon to collect each bin. On different days of the week of course so we have to make sure the correct bin is out on the correct day. At some point there will be wagons available that can separate the 5 waste streams in one pick up but they are currently in short supply, horribly expensive and our contractors don't yet have them.

It's also increased our turnover time ( see current thread about someone complaining about cottage owners needing time to reset for the next guests) as inevitably we now have to resort the bins on each changeover and hope that they are not contaminated by the current guests before a pick up.

It's an absolute nightmare and "green" it absolutely is not.

Thank you - it was from a question on Winning Combination with the hilarious Omid Djalili!

Even if you don't care about recycling, for goodness sake don't put batteries in the normal waste bins! They can get damaged by the waste lorry and start fires, and the contents of batteries are toxic and need disposing of properly. Most supermarkets have battery recycling points, or many councils will take them separately to the general recycling in a plastic bag on top of your bin, or similar.

Yes, I don't know which is worse, really: the people not bothering to put standard recyclables in their recycling bins, or the ones who stick any old thing in there that 'should probably be recyclable, I would have reckoned'. Toys, bikes, hoovers, small appliances etc.

To be honest, if what the councils tell us about items contaminating the loads is true (and I presume it is), it must be extremely rare for them to collect a full load in that isn't contaminated and thus has to go to landfill. 100 or more houses, just one unsuitable item... it must be pretty much every load that ends up having to be buried.

I still can't understand why, decades ago, we managed to successfully re-use glass pop bottles again and again, thus avoiding any need for the recycling process at all - but now, in 'modern, enlightened' times, we somehow can't do that anymore.

Has anybody reported this? Do the bosses know they're doing this - are have they been told to do it? One way or another, that is blatant deception.

My commercial waste collectors at the cottage used to do it this way. It is perfectly possible if the depot is set up to do so. Most council ones are not.

Thanks, Elphame - interesting to know it is possible, then. But how absurd that this facility exists, yet councils don't invest in it. You'd almost think they don't really believe all the recycling messages that they keep fervently promoting to the residents...

I used to work for a top three waste haulier. I don't know what the councils do but a lot of waste is now cubed and burned as renewable energy and used to power local communities - some also sent abroad to be burned for same purposes. There are quite a few 'waste to energy' plants about now.

And yes there was also a 'picking line' at our waste depot where a big team of Eastern Europeans would sort through the recycling. It would be scooped from the bays where the trucks tipped by a big mechanical claw (bit like the 'grab a teddy' arcade machines) and dumped on the conveyor.

Morbidly, the reason I know all this is because one day a body was scooped out from the recycling and dumped onto the picking line conveyor - the manager for that depot explained the process to me while telling the story.

A big factor with contamination is that cardboard can't be washed like plastic. Around 40% of our commercial recycling used to go to landfill due to contamination, but now it's mostly shredded and used as fuel. You'd be amazed what will burn when shredded if the temperature is high enough.

It's now illegal to do it this way in Wales! It's also likely too expensive for councils to invest in the infrastructure for themselves.

Why are you surprised? There are people who are diligent in doing the right thing, those who do it half heartedly and those that can't be bothered at all.

Just as in all areas of life, so why expect recycling to be any different.

It isn't a class thing or anything to do with intelligence or understanding. In my office there are three clearly marked bins for clean, dry recycling, general waste and for compostable food waste.

Seeing so many, supposedly smart colleagues throw an unwashed joghurt pot in the recycling or wet scrunched up paper towel that can't be recycled is so annoying. They are the half hearted crowd, who are actually worse than the can't be bothered. At least the can't be bothered don't end up contaminating the recycling and making the diligent people's effort worthless.

It is.

It's BS that this country recycles anything.

This is what it's like when you have a communal bin.....

It would be (and has been) a dealbreaker for me.

I know plenty of people who don’t recycle

I don’t know how they cope. I assume they must do dump runs with black bags of ‘general waste’ in between bin collections

I also know of someone who burns all their rubbish on their farm land… not sure if that’s even legal, is it? They have one bin that’s for general waste and a 2nd big bin for ‘burning’

Hmm, I'm still not convinced that burning the recycling as 'renewable energy' is really what people would be in the least bit happy about with waste that they've diligently sorted and put out for recycling.

What's the point in us washing it, then? Why is it any better burning recyclable waste than burning general landfill-bound rubbish?

Aside from the ethics and the (most would believe) very underhand way or going about this, how does it even work? Glass and metal: don't burn very easily at all and not good as fuel; paper and card(board): burn away in seconds providing very little energy; plastic: wait, companies are allowed to burn plastic into the atmosphere and are not being heavily fined and closed down for doing so?!

I also know of someone who burns all their rubbish on their farm land… not sure if that’s even legal, is it? They have one bin that’s for general waste and a 2nd big bin for ‘burning’

It's starting to sound like that's what happens to the council 'recycling' anyway, so at least it isn't wasting fuel to transport the waste elsewhere for burning...

The only recycling I refuse to do is food waste. I tried but in a very short time the plastic bags that lined the bin disintegrated so quickly I was left with a sodden stinking mess at the bottom of the bin. I have a waste disposal and my food waste goes down that.