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!

Who is ‘they’ exactly in this situation?

Councils have lost huge amounts of funding from central government, they don’t have cash floating about.

But never mind, there will be some waste disposal workers on low wage who can sort out the dirty stinking jars that loads of people on here are too lazy to wash. That’ll stick it to the man!

We never use to fill our black bin, but now we have 3 cats and cat litter trays! Now full.
I don’t have a dishwasher and I’m fed up to the back teeth of washing recycling. Not my own but I have two adults children living at home and I bloody hate their empty yogurt pods/ready meals and other crap that they eat!
I don’t buy individual yogurt or ready meals!
But I’m looking forward to our new food bins, as the above children also buy crap and let it go out of bloody date!

Mankind really is a plague on the earth.

Just keep consuming and making waste and sending it to landfill because you can't be arsed to wash up and want to play no part at all in the shit you generate. Let someone else deal with it. Imagine having to sort your own rubbish! Look at bins outside your house! Ugh.

So then the people sorting waste have to deal with broken glass as well as dirty containers?

Why is the jar of mayo not ‘gross’ when you use it three seconds before it is empty and put it in your mouth but is suddenly immediately too gross to rinse?

I agree with you. We are so privileged to be able to just put our waste into bins, and that there are people who will come along and remove all the waste we have created - from our doorsteps. And then people still complain. ‘They actually want us to sort and clean our own waste! It’s terrible!’

Absolutely brilliant thread.

The crank sandwich board wearers are out: “the end of the world is nigh if you don’t wash your Sunpat jars!”. And there’s a fierce contest going on for who’s the most “disgusted” at rubbish being in the, er, rubbish bin.

If you want to continue consuming then yes you’ll have to get used to washing jars and bottles. It’s not hard. Thank goodness not everyone thinks like you. Our local council won’t collect items that are dirty as it contaminates the whole batch and ends up in landfill.
Maybe buy less processed food and make it from scratch if you don’t like washing up packaging?

Privileged? They don’t do it out the goodness of their hearts. They’re paid to do it, by us.

Clean soft plastic can be recycled at supermarkets.

I used to wash everything out, but last year, with the drought risk, I did wonder if it was the best use of water.

I think my neighbour must be on this thread. They have put a rubbish bag out but it obviously contains food in some form. The contents are now strewn all over the street because the crows have ripped it open. Maybe they haven't heard that the RSPB now advises against feeding birds.

You can use your washing up water after you've finished the washing up

Hey sunshine. I was a chalet gal in Austria back in 1996 and I had 8 different bins for all sorts of recycling.
You want a list of them...
Food waste (organic)
Bread (went to local farmers for the pigs)
Tin
Glass
Cardboard
Paper
Plastic
General (for all other stuff)

All recyclable material had to be washed clean prior to disposal.

If you put the wrong items in a bin - you were fined by the local authorities. No excuses.

Our general rubbish (small bin!) gets collected every 2 weeks but it isn't even full after 4 weeks because we recycle alot.

Just stop moaning!

And if you have a problem with chicken wrapping... how about you stop eating the poor creatures.

Well, I think some of the issues with jars that are in use for a while, in and out of the fridge, is that there is usually congealed bits (like mayo) which adhere around the ‘shoulder’ area. Even when the main body of the sauce is further down. With a concerted effort using spoons and knifes, you could somewhat get to it. However, if it sort of yellow and dry, you’re not going to really use it when the rest of the jar is used up. We use marmalade with peel, and there are bits which remain stuck again in that shoulder area. They kind of dry out.

For things you use in one go (pasta sauce in glass jars, yoghourt and dessert pots etc), there is always a bit left adhering to the sides. You can scoop with spoons, knives quite a bit, and get a good bit more out, but never all. You could dip into yoghourt pots, peanut butter etc with your finger, and kind of do a scoop right around. You have your hands all dirty then, and you still never get every last bit out of jars. Bit of a palaver and time wasting too.

I use the scraper to avoid all that hassle. Also, as I remove it to my food bin (which goes to recycling) it means I’m using my sink drain as little as possible to dispose of food residue. There are fats and oils in many of those foods in jars.

😂 That is such a privileged thing to say

Yes we are very privileged to live in a country, and a time, when we can afford to produce copious amounts of dirty rubbish and get it collected from our doorsteps and never have to think about it again.

I agree with the principle that we should be washing jars, tins, bags, meat trays etc before putting them in recycling bins (and it really just comes as natural now to do so, whether it’s by way of the already dirty washing up water at the end of a wash or via the dishwasher). However part of me thinks that by doing this, we are just moving the waste problem from landfill to the sewers. I’m not sure our waste water systems are designed to cope with the quite the volume of undissolved fat and food waste that we are now putting through it - which admittedly would previously have gone into a dustbin. I’m always wary when I wash cream/butter/mayonnaise/peanut butter jars out as globules of undissolved fat just glue down the plug.

There is no perfect solution but it feels like it’s something we ought to be able to better deal with. Funny how AI can take our jobs but not quickly and cheaply do something that would be immediately more useful and reduce the harm we are doing to the planet with each minute that goes by.

That really is such a precious, privileged response.

Yes, we pay council tax so people on low incomes can come to our house and take our rubbish away. We moan to fuck about how much council tax we pay, yet we want them to do more work. "Sort my rubbish, my good man. There's congealed mayo in that jar that makes me feel a bit gippy and I can't be looking at 5 bins so it's all in one big one. If you work hard there's a shiny penny for you at Christmas!"

Wash and sort centrally??? You'll be moaning about the massive hike in council tax that it will cost to do that!

Stop being lazy and just wash the bl**dy stuff!

We really want to set up a whole new part of the council to wash our rubbish for us?

We're gross.

For what?

Mayonnaise jars aren't gross.
Plastic containers that once held raw meat are less gross than the raw meat itself.
I suggest you're just being lazy.

This is what I do. I recycle things that are clearly okay to be recycled and can be cleaned easily. Anything else is not worth wasting the water on. There is massive criteria for rejecting recycling, unfortunately.

Why not?