I don’t want to wash up chicken packets and jars of mayonnaise!!

[ChristmasBaby2026]

My council like many have recently changed our recycling. We now have:

• a bin for paper and card
• a bin for “mixed recycling”
• the food bin
• the black bin
• the garden bin (which I have to pay extra for 😡)

The only substantial change other than the number of bins to put things in is they will now collect glass whereas we previously had to go to the bottle bank.

But it now means they are now only collecting our black bin once every THREE weeks (and currently not for 4 because the new system has stupidly started on a recycling week).

How are families supposed to only have rubbish collected once every three weeks? There is simply no way.

I do recycle but I have always drawn the line at washing up gross things like packets of mince and jars of mayonnaise. But apparently the council have decided people have nothing better to do. I wouldn’t resent it so much if I thought it was actually making a difference but my landfill mayonnaise jar is not the main problem here!

I've often thought that big communal bins emptied more frequently, like in France, especially in villages, would be far better.

But the Brits just wouldn't do it. You've got people on this thread who won't rinse a jar or walk onto their own driveway, so how you'd get people to take their rubbish to a communal bin I have no idea!

We have our old glass box outside the back door. Take it to the new mixed wheelie bin then it's full.
Which is better - no planet or one bag in the kitchen that you put glass in?

Love the misinformation on this and all the similar MN recycling threads.
Your dirty mayonnaise jar still gets recycled along with the rest and doesn’t end up in landfill just because it’s dirty.
It doesn’t “contaminate the whole load”
You washing your jars just saves the recycling company a bit of water as they wash all those jars throughly but ultimately has negligible material impact on the qty of jars that get recycled.
You should be much more worried about where the majority of your “recycling” goes to be “recycled”. Hint, it doesn’t get recycled.

I hate the stupid amount of bins we now have to have. I don’t wash out jars and I don’t wash raw meat packaging.

And what? can you elaborate please.

We used to pay extra for garden waste then stopped, and grass cuttings go in the black rubbish bin.
Our council tax is a fortune as it is, without extra.
Washing jars annoys me, as we are also on a very expensive water meter.
I won’t be using the food waste bin, luckily we had a leaflet saying you don’t have to.

Agreed it’s ridiculous. One bin for recyclables, one for non. That’s how it should be.

I used to wash the jars in the dishwater once I'd washed all of the dishes. Or now that I have a dishwasher sometimes I stick it in that. Now that I compost, I live alone but I barely fill a 20l bin each week :o it's crazy how much less I have. All food and paper goes into the compost and the thin plastic goes to the supermarket when I remember, or it goes into the bin. Plastic/tins etc. go into recycling.

But no, it's not that hard to wash a jar and you get used to fewer collections. One thing that you can do is compress items. When I lived in a block of flats and the bins got full I would get annoyed that people didn't compress stuff (you'd see notes put up asking people to) and also people didn't recycle items that were extremely easy to recycle.

And you saw a dead rat. What has that do with this discussion? There have been and always will be rats around humans. You can recycle 100% of your waste and you’ll still get rats.

So many lazy minging people.

https://www.recyclingbins.co.uk/blogs/dear-recycling-bins/is-rinsing-recyclables-a-waste-of-water

Not rinsing them is just pathetic

If I had a box of glass jars by my back door, my toddler would have great fun trying to empty said box when he's in the garden.

It's not just one bag in the kitchen though, is it? It's one more bag, on top of the bag for cardboard, bag for plastics plus your main bin. It's ridiculous.

No

I put everything in the dishwasher. Trays as well. I don’t want a stinky bin.

I had a new food waste bin delivered. I’m not going to use it and have just had an idea to stick it in the loft to put it out of sight.

Not every area is the same. I know our plastic recycling is sorted by hand which is why we’re asked to wash it. Personally I wouldn’t leave any jars with the remains of food in them as it attracts vermin where we live.

I’m really interested to know where recycling goes if it isn’t recycled?

Ah the “truth” from an independent unbiased website

I lived in a flat for 10 years and you realise how much of a lazy arse half the population is. When I lived in an inner city flat in Liverpool it had a bin store. The bin store got so full at the entrance that you couldn't enter it to use the bins any more and then people started throwing the bin bags in the stairwell. It was horrendous.

My Manchester flat had about 3 months where the bins were so full that they wouldn't get collected and it compounded the problem. It eventually got cleared and it never got that bad again, but I would always see the waste bin full of recyclable items, or even clothes/household items that could go to a charity shop and people couldn't even be bothered to move the bin from the driveway to the pavement. There were about 3 of us that would put all of the bins out.

My recycle bins and bags live outside, in the front garden, and my house faces south. There's no way that a single bit of food packaging goes out there unwashed, to sit and bake in the sun for up to a week.

Interesting how many people won’t wash a jar out and disagree with recycling because there are rules.

I guess it’s your children that get to inherit an ever worsening climate 🤷‍♀️

We have the set up you describe @ChristmasBaby2026 and honestly you get used to it. We are a family of 5 with one in nappies. Out glass isn’t collected either we have to take it to a local recycling plant. We have a compost bin so do our own garden waste ourselves!

Dishwashers are generally more environmentally friendly than handwashing, using less water

We have a black bin collection every 3 weeks as a family of 4. It's fine. We recycle enough so that we send maybe half a bin to landfill.

It takes fuck all effort to sort the paper out and fuck all effort rinse a few jars out. Just lazy bastards who think otherwise.

Oh dear. Well I hope you find some ways to manage your wellbeing. 💐

What system? Surely if they have the same bins on bin day then it is fine to mix?

I use one sink full of (environmental) soapy water and wash out any packaging in that. No need for extra hot water or soap. It’s just part of the washing up. It’s no different to washing mayo off plates.

I have an extremely busy life, work full-time, household of 5, cook from scratch every evening, so lots of washing up. But only takes 20 mins to wash up while listening to music, podcast, radio or watching tv. I’d only be sitting on my bum doing the same thing otherwise.

However, I agree it should be explained to people what difference it makes to recycling.

Surely you’re capable of imagining that if hundreds of thousands; or millions of people also don’t bother, then there really is a significant impact on landfill?