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?

We don't have food recycling in our area. However, whilst I can see the justification for making use of the food waste for fuel/energy or whatever, a large part of the arguments in favour of recycling plastic, glass etc. are to keep it from remaining and polluting landfill sites for hundreds of years.

Food waste will rot down into the soil and return the nutrients back to the ground in next to no time.

I don't work in this field - but I did see a lovely filmed demonstration by a recycling company of how the waste is separated by weight on these giant conveyor belts, using sensitive weighing equipment, fans and so on, travelling on to the next station. It was quite ingenious and gave me hope it really does get separated into paper, plastics, and glass. It certainly did in this centre.

Food waste will rot down into the soil and return the nutrients back to the ground in next to no time.

This isn't quite true of a landfill site. Landfill is anaerobic so the food waste produces methane. a compost heap is an aerobic system so it doesn't.

My very elderly neighbour digs a hole about two feet deep in her garden and fills it gradually with non-meat food waste, (she eats mostly fruit and veg) then covers it with soil and starts another.

After 50 years of this her garden soil is amazing.

I do recycle but it's a needle in a haystack and I couldn't get worked up at someone else not doing it.

I wouldn't care if a friend did or didn't recycle

I couldn't get worked up over it. I don't understand the logic of people who wash everything with clean water from the tap to put in the recycling, when it's highly likely to end up getting sent overseas and burned.

I actually went round our councils recycling centre a couple of weeks ago.

All the refuse bins come to the same place - one side is for waste and the other for recycling.

The waste is put in a huge (like 30 m deep) pit for incineration.

The recycling goes through different sections where some of it is sorted by a tromel and lots sorted by hand in different sections, the staff are paid well about min wage and work 4 x long days and Friday is a day off for tidying up the plant with overtime for whoever wants to work. The people stood at a conveyor belt picking out 'their' stuff, ie - one section was plastic, one cardboard etc and popped it into a 'hole' which had a huge cage underneath. The conveyor had a section with a huge magnet for the steel and (here's my best technical description) they 'charged ' the conveyor so the aluminium sort of jumped off into another cage. The cages were all compressed and sold. The stuff people had recycled which was actually waste (unbelievable really - nappies, odd shoes, vapes (5 black bins a day filled with these) plastic bags etc) is dropped into a cage and taken to the incinerator and 'mixed in' (like a grabber at the seaside) to make the waste more flammable.

The bins are checked before off loading as we have certain areas here that don't recycle and put EVERYTHING Into the recycle bins and these are immediately sent to the incinerator bit 😱😱🤬🤬🤬😭😭

I found the visit fascinating and I thought they should take more people round to see what actually happens.

It even makes me feel quite bad about what we did in the 80s when I was a kid and everything just went in the bin!

The sooner they make vapes prescription only for people quitting smoking the better. They are an environmental mess.

I know lots of people who don’t….some because they bought the house and vendors took recycling bins and they would have had to have bought more…..some because they cba….then some do glass only……or cardboard only …..I work for the nhs we don’t recycle ….just one bin which everything goes in 🤷‍♀️

We don’t have two bins in the house. Infact we don’t have any 😬. Recycling goes straight out and a plastic bag is used for that days general rubbish then to the bin.

Me neither

Rinse out cartons? Is that what you are supposed to do?

Please don't throw batteries in the bin!

Recycling is a pain in the arse though but I do do it but I'm not wasting water cleaning things like peanut jars out.

I’m surprised she has the room to bin everything. Cardboard and plastic take a lot of space.

I do recycle 90% of things, and also wash out plastics of food so they’re clean.

However, sometimes food goes bad (like a big tub of coleslaw) and then I dither for ages trying to psych myself up to dispose of the smelly coleslaw and wash the plastic for recycling. So then I end up throwing the tub in the rubbish and then feel guilty for quite a while.

It is lazy. We have three separate bins in our kitchen. Then we transfer into our communal recycling bins or take to the supermarket ones. It's not that hard. I actually find it quite satisfying sorting the items and knowing that I'm doing good.

Even when people know it's a waste of time because it goes into the same dump, they still do it. I think some just enjoy following pointless rules.

Yeah, it'd be easier to care if the breeders of the next generations cared about their own offspring enough to stop buying shitloads of new stuff, driving brand new SUVs, flying abroad, etc.

I've never not recycled, but these days I'm not as bothered about it because I don't see it as my responsibility to prevent the suffering of other people's children when they've chosen to bring them into a climate crisis and exacerbate the problems! 🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️

Yes! of course you are.

I'd think my friend was a bit of an arse for not recycling. The city's waste reclamation centre (or recycling centre or whatever it's called) is absolutely fascinating. Things get separated and recycled much more than some of the lazy gits cynics here would have you believe.

Recycling in the uk largely gets shipped abroad and burned / dumped etc so it's largely pointless anyway.

We recycle with mull club, that way we know it's actually getting recycled, worth a look. It's so good!

mull-club.co.uk

Well this is the 3rd time in 5 weeks that our recycling hasn't been picked up (it's supposed to be a weekly collection). It's getting to the point where I'm thinking if they cba to collect it then I cba to keep on putting it in the "correct" bin. The only bin guaranteed to be collected is the household rubbish every 2 weeks, so everything will go in there ready for tomorrow's collection because it's not hanging around for another week.

Well there’s worse things than lazy eh