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 have weekly collection of food waste and I’ve seen the bin men tipping that into the black bin

Yep. I was a plane trip away from home and noticed the garbage collection at that airport just took all rubbish, no matter which bins it had been separated into and tipped each one into the same big garbage cart. The office I was visiting in that trip also told me not to bother sorting my stuff in the kitchen (as I went to do in the bins set up for it) as the area was only doing landfill rubbish so didn’t care what was mixed with what. So not something odd isolated to my home area!

@GasPanic

At mine they do a quick visual check to see if much is contaminated (they 'know' certain areas are rife for contaminated refuse) and if it's too much then yes it's sent straight to the incinerator. I was watching it come down the lines and the stuff people had put in the recycling was bizarre - it's not hard, we've one recycling bin here and everything goes in it - plastics, pop / milk cartons, paper, cardboard, tins and cans. Everything else in the black bin.

Oh! Now my husband squashes coke cans so that is a win. In defence I don’t think our bin lorry says that!!

I'm in a European country at the moment and beginning to wonder why UK bothers...mind you plastic straws again are amazing after the paper rubbish. Do struggle with the amount of plastic being binned here though ...

It's not, I'm afraid. Everything is washed after it's been sorted....the "pre-rinse", if you will, just means that it saves a bit of time that's all. Entire lorry loads aren't condemned just because someone hasn't rinsed a jam-jar.

It wss the same where I used to work- a big name company had multiple bins for staff to recycle rubbish, posters on the walls telling you what goes where. I saw people making mistakes ( digging their coke can out of the “paper” bin etc ) - thing was it all went into one big skip out the back anyway!

Most councils have 'waste to energy' schemes nowadays where they burn the waste to generate power. Increasingly, this is used to power the local area.

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?

They don't usually burn recycling unless it's contaminated. General waste is put through a shredder so it burns easily.

It's actually not. I drove a recycling truck for three years, collecting recycling from commercial clients. You can't sift through a wheelie bin looking for unwashed yogurt pots. 😂 You're not supposed to touch the contents inside in case there are needles etc.

You lift the lid, have a quick look, and tip it if it looks OK. There's a tolerance for contaminated waste which I think is something like 5%. That's actually quite a lot when you can carry around 10 tons.

I never did residential as it's much grimmer but 100% binmen aren't sifting through every bin looking for unwashed pots.

About 15 years ago- living at a different council area to where I am now. Used to have a big green plastic box (similar to a stack n store box but stronger) for plastic bottles and cans. Fortnightly collection. There was a tuna can not washed out. There were maggots crawling around! Yuk

The only reason I 'recycle' is so my general waste bin doesn't overflow.

I do rinse things out but that's so my bins stink a bit less and stay a bit cleaner.

I don't do it for the environment. I don't believe things get recycled the way they say they do. Anyone remember that Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall documentary about it?

My MIL and my SIL don't. Its awful. I was round MIL's the other day and she had bought loads and loads of canned and bottled drinks and SIL and her 6 kids were just downing one after another and chucking them straight in the general waste bin. I was ITCHING to fish them all back out. But put them where? MIL doesn't even have a useable recycling wheelie bin as she's filled it with all her garden waste. They don't GAF and it honestly makes me think a bit less of them. So selfish and lazy.
I once asked SIL about why she doesn't. She said she "just doesn't" I said does your black bin not get really full with six kids and no recycling? and she just sort of laughed and said "yeah.. and we have two". WTF.

I want a system where we are paid to recycle, food waste and garden waste (especially the food and garden since they compost it and sell it)

Even a few pence per bin load off your council tax building up based on weight and appearing not contaminated as being loaded.

Rather than I pay them to take my garden waste for them to compost to sell back to me 🤣

Maybe a X pence her rubbish debit and a X pence per recycling/food/garden credit. Make it pay to be green 🤷🏻‍♀️

I don't mean to be condescending but is the already existing environmental benefits not incentive enough?
Why do you need to be paid? why? for saving your own planet?

Because for a lot of people it doesn’t matter so an incentive especially cash tends to help.

I already recycle and compost and grow my own fruit and veg and don’t holiday aboard I’m not your but why audience.

But dangle a hey we will pay you to recycle and just like we will pay you to change when you use electric and people do it because even if it’s 50p it’s a free 50p. Those people who don’t want to use their paid for water to clean a jar and thus contaminate or just rubbish bin might go huh ok I’ll do it it’s cost effective.

Also a lot of people rightly so again believe they will be long dead before it’s that’s bad so not their circus not their monkeys to use a mn phrase.

Sadly this. And I think a lot of people are more focused on the day to day.

I live in a flat but absolutely still recycle, I just can’t imagine putting food into the bin or plastic bottles. It doesn’t take long recycling, even if you can’t fit more than a few things into the big communal bins. You’re talking a couple of mins to empty, hardly a huge hassle.

One thing that infuriates me is when the various authorities blame ME for plastic waste getting into the oceans and harming wildlife. Not just the people who chuck their plastic bottles anywhere, but everybody who uses them.

I carefully put my plastic bottles and other plastic waste into the recycling bin, then put it out for the council to collect. If they are so careless with it after that that it ends up in the wild, that is entirely their fault and not mine.

Maybe, just maybe, it's them filling gigantic ships with plastic that they've lied to me that they're going to recycle and sending them all the way off to Malaysia to be (they hope) burned that causes it to end up in the oceans? What a nerve.

There are a couple of families who just throw rubbish in their general bin without putting in in some of bag. It must stink.

We don't bother with recycling. I used to do it sporadically before the ecoevangalism that took over the world when the kids were all playing truant over it.

Then it started to get dogmatic. I've not got time to go sorting things for the council and washing litter. I honestly don't think it'll make a massive difference within our collective lifetimes and there are far bigger issues to tackle...and most of it ends up in landfill anyway. Should the council want to sort it what am I paying council tax for the work shouldn't fall to me.

At the point the push started, I stopped completely. We just use the general landfill waste bin. It works for us. I honestly would begrudge the space for all of their recycling bins on my property. Anyway if they'd led with the carrot not the stick things could've been so different, as is the moment it became dogmatic I essentially stopped.

I do recycle - but genuinely resent the intrusion into my life that it takes. That and the relentless gloom of looking forward to living in electrically heated houses in the future (like being a student all over again), and only having cars that can drive 100 miles between charges.

Then the government wonder why there is no optimism and "growth" of the economy and jobs.

I don’t do food waste.

The very first time I tried that, the brand new food bin was chomped through by mice/rats. No, thank you.

I also think a lot of people simply don’t have capacity for it. Not everyone leads a calm and ordered life.

I recycle most of what I can, BUT, honestly, if it's a faff to wash it out, I often chuck it in the bin.
I know we are told we are doing our bit for the planet but it's blindingly obvious that big business is causing most of the problem and has no intention of stopping. Sometimes I get so annoyed with it all that I sort of give up on the messy stuff.