to not pay £50 a year for green waste recycling and just put it in landfill instead?

[amidaiwish]

We've had a green waste bin (for grass cuttings, garden waste etc.) for a couple of years and the renewal bill has just come through. It's £50 a year for the collection.

Surely the council would prefer us to use green waste rather than put it in with our normal rubbish? Why do we have to pay for this collection?

there must be another side to this but i'm struggling to see it! so, aibu?

Our green waste collection is free.. along with our food waste and household rubbish collection..

surely that's one of the things your council tax covers?

sounds bizarre they'd make you pay!! what council are you part of?

YABU, its only a £1 a week! Not only that, if its going in the normal rubbish, there'll be more of that to collect instead, and that'd go up in price.

Ours is free too? Is that not a national policy?

I bet a lot of people won't pay, and will go back to just binning. £50 is a lot.

Ours won't collect garden waste as part of normal rubbish collection.

You know the other side, surely? We all produce too much waste. We have send less to landfill. Green waste can be composted by the council. Either they add the cost of this to your council tax (not fair on those without gardens) or you pay for it directly.

If you compost all your own, then I guess you could ask not to pay. It does seem odd that it's not part of your council tax; but all that does is make your council tax that bit lower!

We have a similar scheme, ours costs £40 a year. We can't put it in the normal bin but tbh it wouldn't fit in ours anyway, it's full with normal rubbish. I don't mind paying, we don't have the space to compost and it's probably cheaper than driving to the tip every time we cut the grass.

Ours is less than that, but it's an optional service - they won't take green waste in the main bin, but if you don't want to pay then you either have to compost it all yourself or take it to the tip.

Our is included in the council tax, also the various recycling boxes...

I wish they would sell the resulting compost back to us cheap though!

Well, DH was at the tip recycling centre the other day, put all of our plastic bottles in the recycling bin and moved on to the paper (our roadside collections are woeful). He turns around to see the plastic recycling bin being emptied straight into landfill! He did ask and just got a shrug with the explanation of it being contaminated, but the guy seemed to suggest that this was normal behaviour.

There is no doubt in my mind that much of our careful recycling ends up where it shouldn't, pfft.

Wasn't there a scandal a few years back where loads of stuff collected as "recycling" ended up in landfill in china?

Yes I remember that happening. Also many councils are currently storing waste you carefully seperated or just putting it all back together and landfilling it. So the OP is NBU to mind paying extra for it.

i suspect that's why we don't see any cheap/free compost like other councils do.

I reckon it's all in a big hole in india with little desperate kiddies picking it over

Councils have to pay to send rubbish to landfill as well as to recycle the recyclable stuff, so I think it's unfair to charge for the green waste collection.

When I lived in Islington we had a garden waste collection and a kitchen waste bucket, with frequent communications reminding us not to put garden waste in the kitchen bucket and vice versa. But then when they collected it they put it all in the same truck!

YANBU... I am sending mine back as ours has gone up to £53 on top of the council tax going up to £1750/per year. I'm not paying for the green bin on principle

I remember an article about plastic bag recycling, them being packed onto ships, shipped to china to be recycled and then shipped back. Very economical

It's a shame that there's so much misinformation/distrust about recycling

In 2000, 90% of household waste in England was sent to landfill; last year, it was 60%.

It is estimated that about 10%, max, of recyclable content is sent to landfill; this is because of contamination. Recyclable material is worth a lot more, per tonne, than landfill gate fees per tonne. Nobody sends good recyclable material to landfill; it would be throwing money down the drain.

As to China and India, if they regard recyclable material as a valuable commodity hat help their economies to grow (and they do) why shouldn't we send it there?

The biggest problem in recycling is the lack of investment in bang up-to-date processing plants that would solve a lot of the contaminate problems - another green economic opportunity missed in the budget.

if they'll take your green waste with the household I don't see a problem
it'll compost at the landfill

I only realised recently that as well as charging us for the service (which they're not properly doing, here anyway), they also get paid for the plastics etc.....so get money all round.

Policywonk this wasn't about them deciding to send it to china or deciding it wasn't suitable for landfill. Some councils are storing waste in empty buildings and not doing anything with it, some burying it all together and some giving it to contractors who dump it where they can. There have been threads on here (probably in the news section) if you've not heard about this.

We have to buy green bags for green waste for composting. I think Not sure as we have a compost bin.

I commented on the China/India factor because posters on this thread had brought the issue up.

'Some councils are doing...' - well, if some councils are doing any of those things, they're foolish and local electors should get rid of them for gross economic incompetence.

I don't believe half of these stories though. I think they're politically-motivated exaggerations, like the hoary old nonsense about 'Winterval' that gets dragged out year after year despite there being barely a grain of truth in it.

paisley - there's no point things 'composting' in landfill. They're still taking up space in landfill, and nobody is going to dig the compost out of landfill and spread it on their garden. So it's not really composting at all.

i'm in Richmond council, blimming council tax is a fortune (£2200/year for a semi detached house) grrrrr....

a few years back we used to put the grass cuttings in the bin, in a bin bag like everyone else i guess. no idea that you weren't "allowed". about 1/3 of houses or less on our road have a green bin, all have gardens, so surely everyone else is just putting it all in the bin?

i recycle a lot (black box for plastic bottles, tin, glass etc is overflowing, blue box for paper/card is always full each week) so there is plenty of room in the bin for a bag of grass cuttings every week or so. our garden isn't particularly big and we're not big gardeners so really very little to send.

ridiculous though isn't it? i know it is just £1/week but it should be included.

oh btw re recycling, my friend is involved in recycling. he said that some of our recycling waste currently IS sent to landfill because the recycling plants are at full capacity. But we will only get more capacity when the amount of recycling reaches a certain level, so it is still worth recycling everything!

otherwise we would have recycling plants sitting unused or not at optimum capacity to be cost effective.

Is it not true then about UK rubbish ending up on landfill in other countries and all that stuff about computers?

The words "what the hell do we pay council tax for" springs to mind