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!

No recycling for detached houses?! What on earth is the logic behind that?

Seriously it takes one minute to wash out jars

as to the meat I agree I would still bin. You will just have to squash it down hard

@beeble347 Ha yes I laughed at the person who could not be bothered to take their glass recycling out. I wash mine, store it in a special bag and box (provided by the council) by the door and once or twice a week I lug it down four flights of stairs to the rear of our block of flats to put it in the communal bins.

Thank you for your post, and the other offering suggestions.
I suppose the reason I didn’t know either of these is that I live in a village with no large shops and am 10 miles from my closest supermarket, so I normally have my grocery shopping delivered. I very rarely visit bricks and mortar shops either.
Fortunately I don’t have to dispose of many batteries as most of mine are rechargeable.

Getting people to do it means they don’t have to pay operators to do it instead.

Actually looking it up you can pay the waste collection company to collect recycling as well as general waste (waste collection is not council run in my country, you pay private companies to collect, apparently around 7 euros per collection. On the plus side you can choose if you want collection weekly or less often, or want a bigger bin) but that seems a lot worse than just taking the recycling with me to the shop. Blocks of flats and terraces of houses are owned/run by housing companies which pay for communal bins and their collection.

I can’t believe people aren’t washing out jars and the like?! Big deal.

@LumpyandBumps We are fortunate in that our bin collection will take batteries as long as they are in a different bag and placed on top of the waste bin - not inside. Hopefully this comes your way

To those bemoaning the waster of kitchen roll we use a silicone spatula or a very long handled spoon - I think it's a cocktail stirrer. I'm too mean to waste an ounce of mayonnaise so nothing is going down the sink to cause a fat blockage.

What I really don't understand is why the whole country's waste collection is not standardised. I get everything collected from the house including food waste which came into effect a couple of months ago.

Well our council are dinosaurs and I’m still sending chicken packaging to landfill. We only got food bins a few months ago which is nuts.

I try and use the very dregs of jars and shake it up into something else so it only needs a rinse and shake

end of mustard - salad dressing
passata - rinse with water and add to pan
Nutella/smooth peanut butter - hot milk to make a drink!
end of jam - more salad dressing
mint sauce - yoghurt to make a dressing
marmite - near boiling water and into cottage pie or a beef stew

it’s like a game now what I can use it for!

No - I just put the lid back on the jar. No ming

My car cleans my meat containers for me 😺

Anything put in the recycling that is not washed contaminates the bin load and none of it can be recycled. The machines at the other end get clogged up and break down. Sometimes if the bin collectors notice they leave a note and refuse to take a contaminated bin - this also includes non recyclables. Even pizza boxes with grease on aren’t allowed.

Our issue is that our recycling bin only takes clean tin, paper, card and then only plastic bottles that have a lid. No other plastic is allowed even if the pack states it’s recycling. So our waste bins get fully. We don’t have glass collecting either. They are collected fortnightly. In this heat though my waste bins stinks. If we want recycle soft plastic or those plastic food trays then they have to be taken to specific recycling points at the tip usually and still need to be clean.

Sorry op but I do think yabu. Recycling is SO important and yes it takes a bit of effort but the payoff long term if everyone collectively made a solid effort is huge.

I just run hot water into things like jars to clean them. The only thing I don't do is raw chicken packaging because I worry about the risk of that splashing over the sink area and making us sick. I don't really think anything else takes a huge amount of effort really, just a good rinse when I'm doing the dishes or as I go.

My black bin is currently out every fortnight but I'd say I could get 4 weeks out of it easy enough. Recycling bin is always pretty full.

The onus is on consumers because you are the one choosing to buy what you're buying and consume what you're consuming. I think it's a good thing that we are being made to me more conscious of what we're purchasing and what options we choose and how that's contributing to the issues we have environmentally.

YANBU about having that many bins and
for only having a collection every four weeks.
we just have normal bins which everything goes in but in different bags - clear for recycling and black for general waste. We also have a food caddy.
Garden waste is put out in black bags on the garden path.
Everything is taken every week

YABU to refuse to rinse out food jars, it doesn’t take much effort

Wow, seriously! How long does it take to rinse a jar? That is just the height of laziness. You just fill it with water, put the lid on, give it a shake and then empty it - it takes literal seconds. Likewise with raw meat packaging. If you're fussed about germs, you can rinse raw meat packaging with boiling water from the kettle.
Our black bins have been emptied every 3 weeks for years and our recycling goes every other week. It's no drama, no problem, the bin is never over full and we recycle everything we can. We're a family of 4, so get through a fair bit of rubbish each week.

This is the same as our area, maybe we live nearby 😂 I just put the glass in the dishwasher along with the packaging from the mince. It’s fine.

I always thought the extra water being wasted washing these things probably undoes all the good of recycling.

This thread is completely bonkers. No one, absolutely no one, has mentioned how we wouldn’t need to recycle so much if we didn’t have so much bloody packaging. And then everyone is happy to use HOT water (yes, using energy) to wash food stuff and oils in to the sewers.
The world is completely arse about face.

What a strange attitude… we have had separate collections for years here, living in a UK city, and hardly anything goes in our black bin. It’s not difficult to rinse things out, keep your home cleaner, be less wasteful and make the life of those processing your recycling safer.
Central Europe has been doing this for decades, I remember learning about different recycle bins at my exchange friend’s house in the 1980s. It always amazes me how bloody minded the British can be about something so sensible. Just get into the new habit, it’s really no big deal.

Although its probably quite a privileged position to be able to use water (if on a meter) and electricity boiling water to rinse out a plastic tub thats going in the bin

I just shove all waste in which ever bin is due to be collected next, I always put non recyclables like
Nappies and dog poo inside a recycleable
item like a pasta jar or cereal box to hide it

When the planet implodes it will be you that caused it

I always wash them, before recycling mainly in the dishwasher, but this is even more of a reason to do so!

You hide it in a see through jar?
Reminds me of playing hide and seek as kids when my little brother would stand in the middle of the lawn with his hands over his eyes because he thought we couldn’t see him if he covered his eyes.