AIBU to think not using bin liners is borderline insane?

[baconger]

DH grew up in a house where they simply didn’t use bin liners. Anywhere. Ever. Not even the kitchen bin. Not even the one they use for food waste.

If I don’t specifically remind DH, he’ll quite happily take the bins out and then call it a day without putting a new liner in.

To this day, my ILs still don’t use bin liners. They genuinely just put rubbish straight into the bin. After they dump the rubbish into their wheelie bin/compost heap they don’t wash the bins out.

I find this… unconventional, completely bizarre, bordering on insane. Maybe I’m being ridiculous but surely bin liners are a pretty standard thing? Especially for food waste? Whenever I mention that it’s really unhygienic I’m told it’s fine they’ve been doing this forever and nothing bad has come of it. Please tell me I’m not being completely unreasonable here?

I had a quick Google and found several articles stating that only about 17% of plastic waste is recycled within the UK. Some of these articles implied that this meant most of the plastic collected for recycling was actually sent for incineration etc, but I'm not sure the data really supports this. Some key articles were in sources that are typically sceptical about protecting the environment (e.g., this one in the Telegraph), so I'm afraid there may have been an element of intentionally misleading their readers.

The articles I saw mostly referred back to research done by Greenpeace, which ultimately came from households counting items of plastic waste and recording how they disposed of them - i.e., did they go into the recycling bin or the general waste. See Results 2026 (Home Page) | The Big Plastic Count

There are two obvious problems with this. First, it only tells us whether items entered the participants' councils' recycling systems and not what actually happened to the material later. For this reason alone it's irrelevant to your question. Secondly, and actually more importantly IMO, it relies entirely on the number of items and not the quantity of plastic.

I know in our house large bottles and boxes made from thick plastic are very likely to be recycled. Small pieces of soft plastic film, bags etc. are not collected for recycling. Yes, we could collect them up and deliver them to a collection point but in practice many end up in the general waste. But you'd need a huge number - hundreds if not thousands - of these small items to make up the same amount of plastic as one large item like a laundry detergent bottles.

I can see why Greenpeace use the number of items, as it would be very difficult to recruit volunteers willing to weigh every piece of plastic thrown away, but it's a really significant flaw in the methodology. Unfortunately this approach seems to have led many people to feel disheartened about the value of recycling, and my feeling is that it will ultimately have resulted in many millions of items ending up in general waste when they could have been recycled - the last outcome that well-intentioned staff at Greenpeace would have wanted, I'm sure.

Sorry, bit of a long post.

At least one authority felt the need to try and correct the false impression left by an article in the Telegraph about recyclable materials being destroyed - Recycling is not thrown away! - WRWA

We don’t line our food caddy. However we do live in the middle of nowhere and don’t have food recycling or whatever it’s called, we have a compost heap. So every few days we chuck it in the compost at the bottom of the garden and then clean the caddy. If it was going into a bin near my house then yes I’d probably want to use bags.

I do use bin bags in my kitchen and bathroom bins. And clean the bins occasionally.

I’ve never cleaned the wheely bin.

Their kitchen must reek!