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!

You don't have to drink or bathe in the mayo water. And the jar doesn't need to be 100% clean.

Yes but if you want a decent blob for your chips it’s much easier and nicer to just open a new jar. I can’t explain it but the fresh jar mayo just tastes infinitely better and you get to have it in a little satisfying wobbly blob.

I mean I don’t eat the ends of the bread, think that is quite normal tbh!

Everything gets rinsed in the washing up water after the washing up is done.
It's doesn't use anymore resources.

Ok so we’ll just let the planet burn then

Agree. My black bin is every three weeks, only one bag of rubbish goes out, sometimes two. I think the system works.

Finishing a jar of mayo is also quite normal tbh.

What I'm learning is that you're wasteful as well as selfish.

You're being flippant about the whole thing, but our planet is literally dying and you can't be arsed to wash out a jar to do your bit, or clean out meat trays of respect for the workers who have to handle your waste.

Well said

East Sussex have been doing this for a decade or more:

Energy from waste

They want to build another one over near Bexhill, but there's a lot of local opposition.

My district council have a really good waste collection service. Food waste every week, recycling and general waste alternate weeks, with just two wheelie bins. Recyclables all go in the same bin, so no tedious sorting, and the only things they don't take are batteries and soft plastic, which I take to the supermarket when I go shopping. The borough and district councils are being abolished in a couple of years, so I don't know how long it will stay like that.

I wonder how many of the "too busy to rinse a meat tray or jar" people have been beset with maggots and flies in this heat wave?

If your council is sending recyclables to landfill, they're wasting your money.

They'll be paying the local govt equivalent of "landfill tax" and not getting recycling credits, so will ultimately get less money from the government. That means that more will have to come from council tax or services cut.

I think you're the one who's not "hygienic" by putting manky food containers straight into the rubbish/recycling!

I do think mayo is disgusting, I can’t even stand the smell of it. I still manage to wash the bottles out.
Why is washing the chicken tray out but not the cutting board you’ve cut it on?

Some people along the road from me used to put unwashed cat food tins in their recycling, the mingers.

They had two notes left on the recycling bin telling them not to do it, and when they ignored them, they got a letter from the council saying that if it continued, the council would stop collecting from their house!

On our street we're going private. We've bought one big bin between us and it's £12 a week to get it emptied by the commercial company. That's fine!

The bins are so awful here -- we have hundreds of little plastic bags and boxes all over the pavement (we don't have back yards as it's an historic town centre). There's a woman who uses a wheelchair who can't get past to church. We never know when they are coming. - it's just random days, and everyone who goes up the woods to walks their dogs puts their shit in them so they stink all the time. And there's NOTHING we can do about it. - all appeals to the council have been flatly rejected.

So we're just going rogue as we've had enough. It's a shame about the recycling but I think I can take my tiny amount of bottles to the supermarket over the road.

I do wonder how much rinsing stuff contributes to blocking drains.

Or near the entrance, at my supermarket.

Why is the rubbish on the pavement?

Nvm, I understand now, the little plastic boxes, etc are the bins

Apparently glass is one of the easiest things to recycle and it can be used lots of times, so it’s a bit of a tragedy to put it into the general waste. You might also find three weeks is fine if you are recycling everything you can and you also have food waste collected. What actually goes in the general waste? Mine is just a bits of polystyrene and film from food packaging, there’s hardly anything.

Because there's nowhere else for it to go, except the road, @QuietComet . The houses open directly onto the pavement and there's no back -- the town is on a hill so it just goes up steps at the back.

Yeah I realised after my comment what you meant. I thought the little plastic boxes, etc you mentioned were the rubbish

Oh no the bins are what are all over the place, lol. We have 4-5 bins per household, so it's a lot of bins between us! We don't use most of them. We really do not need 30 rubbish containers on the pavement. I barely generate any rubbish myself -- about half a pedal bin sized bag a week, but I must fight my way out my house through these things every day.

There is one place where we could put a big bin and just share it, but the council refuses to let us because that's only for flats and there are flats and houses in one big connected rambling old pile of stone. And apparently that means we can't have one big bin between us because as we all know, all councils are just implacable walls of pointless bureaucracy who just tax you and spit in your face when you ask for anything at all in return.

So we will just pay a company to do it ourselves. It's actually very affordable - I'm putting in two pounds a week and it will dramatically improve my life, so hurray!

I don’t know if you want actual advice, so sorry if you’re just venting, but leaving it to soak is the much easier method. With things like ready meal trays, we leave it with some water in the tray and by bedtime it can just be tipped out and it’s completely clean, ready to be recycled. No effort other than turning the tap on for a few seconds required.

I hate wasting anything. This thread is blowing my mind. It is so precious and vulgar not to eat mayo from the sides of the jar because you like a crisp blob to dip into. How are people living like this? It surely must be a wind up.

Billionaires are a massive problem. But there are also billions of individuals on the planet that need to take responsibility for their own shit. Living like everything is a finite resource - we can just make more plastic! More glass! - is really quite disgusting, and just so casual and ignorant. I'd be the first to take my pitchfork to Elon Musk, but that does not absolve me from making the most of the resources we are lucky enough to have.

I wouldn't even say I'm an eco warrior either. I hate washing the jars out. It's a ballache. Another goddamn thing. But - I do it. Because I'm not a selfish child.

Just rinse them. It’s not hard to turn on the hot tap, half fill a mayo jar, put the lid on and shake it about.

I just get on with it and do it because it’s necessary. It’s a very easy thing to achieve and it is not a lot to ask of the households, just to clean our recyclables. The benefits of doing so are obvious. Not doing so results in flies, maggots, ungodly stench and the people who have to handle this waste down the line will be grateful, just as I know I would be if it was my job to dispense with it after it leaves our house.

The idea that someone else has to deal with your stinking rotting sun-baked waste is just so grim.