to LOATHE recycling?

[GetOrfMoiLand]

Don't get me wrong, I do it.

But it is up there with hoovering as the most hateful domestic job.

All that rinsing out jars. Trampling down boxes. Folding up card. Collecting papers and cans etc and storing in a messy corner. Putting out recycling box in the rain. Enptying rain water out of recysling box at the end of the day. Fishing things out of the bin which DD has hurled in there.

Top hatred reserved for the waste food bin. Washing the vile bin at the end of the week. Urgh.

Running out of room and having to post excess waste in recycling area in Asda soding car park. Again in the rain.

Wpould love to just throw everything in black sacks and forget about it.

YANBU.

After living in this area for 18 months I finally get a leaflet saying what can go in the different bins. Totally different from what it says on the bins themselves.
They do take food waste, which is great (except for the smell factor with a fortnightly collection), but they won't take glass! FFS! I have been putting glass in the recycling bin ever since we got here.

So now in the kitchen we have recycling, food waste, 'other' and glass bins. It's getting ridiculous, and finding ways of keeping a toddler out of 4 separate bins is no fun.

We live in a large village - the council run a recycling scheme in the main town (4 miles away!!) but still claim that they don't have the resources to extend to the villages. We used to live 2 miles up the road but under a different council and they were brilliant and took everything.

I am sure I will get flamed, but I do not do it anymore. Our recycling bin came with a full A4 page of instructions about what could and could not go in, plain paper was okay, coloured or stapled paper was out. Milk cartons were in, but the plastic milk caps were out. And so forth. Then the note said if you got it wrong you ran the risk of being fined. So i thought 'stuff it' frankly. They make it hard, then punish us if we make a mistake.

That said..... we save all our jars and re-use them for everything you can think of....

I sort out paper and plastic, neither of which are messy, but feel bugger all guilt at slinging the rest in a bin bag. Pay stacks of council tax and don't see why I should have to sort my rubbish as well. Heard it all ends up in landfill abroad anyway!So no, YANBU

It is a pain in the arse, I do agree They collect everything weekly here though - where my friend lives, they do general recycling and food waste every two alternate weeks - which means it's a month between collections. That is gross tbh

I hate it too.

We have to take our own plastic to big bins as they don't collect that.

Glass separate bin, tins separate bin, paper separate bag and card/food/garden waste in the green bin. Its a faff.

I do it but do it begrudgingly.

We recycle everything going and it begins to feel like its taking over my house - I just want to chuck the whole lot in the bin. Our area has just gone to fortnightly rubbish collection so I can't even do that!!

Our council was found to be dumping most of the sorted recyclable stuff in landfill anyway. Consequently, I no longer bother.

I agree with nickelbabe.

What really annoys me is when we take our recycling up the tip (nicely sorted), and put our PET plastics in the appropriate skip, (bearing in mind we are only allowed to put in bottles although as far as I can see, PET is PET regardless of whether it has been squished into a bottle shape or a strawberry punnet shape) and whilst driving out of the tip see the recycling men emptying the skip into the general waste

Oooh. I really could talk about this all day! However, I am currently busy wondering if Ladybiscuit dishwashes her empties and wears an apron and Cath Kidston rubber gloves when recycling into her smart John Lewis recycling bin as opposed to me with my baby food encrusted jars from lazy washing up, holey Marigolds and my dirty Ikea bin...

Perhaps this is the reason I do not enjoy recycling, I need to get some proper recycling clothes...

Where I am, you have two bins. One for general waste and the other for plastic, tins, glass and cardboard. We pay 11euro to get our general waste bin emptied and 8euro to get our recycling bin emptied. We just go to local garage or shop and pay for a tag to go on the bin, meaning you can squash as much general waste as you can into a bin and then choose to put it out to get emptied on collection days.

Unfortunately, when we moved into this house our recycling bin had been 'misplaced' so we were required to buy a new bin. Just before buying one of the bins, I watched the bin lorry come into our street and pick up a recycling bin and a general. waste one at the same time and empty them into the lorry, I thought that maybe the lorry had two separate compartments, but no. All the rubbish was in a great big mess, getting squished together in the back...

So, I no longer do it.

When I lived in Scotland, they had just introduced a new scheme where your bin lid had to be firmly down on your general waste bin, if it wasn't - your bin wouldn't be collected. They had also taken away the recycling centre we had in the village and the closest one was 10miles away. They also refused to give me a new bin when ours ended up on a bonfire.

I do dishwash my empties. Busted

However I do not own anything by Cath Kidston

I have a fairly new kitchen and am still at the 'making an effort' stage. It won't last, believe me

Agree. But the amount of plastic bottles and card we get through they'd still be a bloody nuisance even if we did just put them in the bin. We'd get through about 5 bags a week.

It's the amount of crap that we have to get rid of that's the problem not the recycling of it IMO.

I don't get that with recycling all glass, plastic, card (but not pizza boxes) etc etc ad infinitum and food we still have to squash everything down in our black general waste bin.

Just gone to fortnightly collections here too. And they will refuse to take the rubbish if the bin isn't down.

And why why why can they not recycle bottle tops.

Yes I rinse evetything out (sould destroying) as they will put dirty bottles and jars back in the box and leave a shitty note WASH ALL CONTAINERS BEFORE RECYCLING AS THEY WILL NOT BE TAKEN AWAY IF DIRTY in bright yellow A4 so feel shamed.

Think I must be lucky where I am (Islington). All recycling (paper, tins, cans, card, plastic) goes into one recycling bin and is collected by council. I have my own compost heap in garden so just tip food waste onto that (which resident rat in garden appears to appreciate ). I have my own bin in kitchen for recycling, then just tip it straight into green bin outside once a week. Easy peasy.

Mind you, when I go to our place in France, you have to do your own recycling at the local depot. I quite enjoy loading up car, taking all the various boxes down and sorting it all out. Especially pushing the bottles into the bottle bank and hearing the crash each time!

Don't worry everybody, if you can't be arsed to separate your recycling, a small malnourished child in India will go through the fetid stinking rubbish heap to find recyclable items on your behalf.

sermon over - i do sympathise with those of you who find it another hideous chore. if you have to do it all yourselves no wonder you feel like wee slaveys. def a chore to share out in the family i think - passing on the joys of living greenly to DC and all that. unfortunately recycling ain't going anywhere - landfill is almost landfull. remember italy last year? i'd rather rinse a few stinky tins/have bowls of scraps in the kitchen than have piles of rotting garbage left in the street because there's nowhere else to put it. oh and re the toddler/bin problem - we use one of those babyjails you can use in a straight line and block off the utility corner from DD. or maybe use those 'under the sink' pull out bins with a cupboard toddler-lock?

Man, I freaking HATE recycling (but do it before omaoma has a go). I tink it's because for general rubbish - carry into hallway, put down rubbish chute (which is actually pretty awesome). Recyclying - traipse down 10+ floors, walk outside to cold and rain, try and figure out which freaking bin isn't locked, put recycling in.

Man I hate it, completely irrationally

i would rather have a communal recycling point within walking distance so i could get rid of all the boxes, cans etc every couple of days rather than have the different bins cluttering up my shoe box garden & matchbox kitchen.
Also trying to remember what gets collected on which wk - sick of having to watch the neighbours to work out which bin to put out!

sorry Serenity, i did sound a bit overweening there... i'm no saint, believe me, just spend a lot of time racked with guilt about how utterly indulged my lifestyle is compared to most of the world. totally agree that councils are useless at managing recycling and often don't make it as straightforward as it should be. why is it so hard to motivate people, rather than whip them into line? kind of like the idea of the money-off-your-council-tax-bill for recycling option.

sorry, i've been working (for a change)

re: the newspaper and the food waste...
make a "basket" with a sheet of newspaper (fold up the corners) like this one (without the handles)
then put it inside a plastic bin-with-a-lid (like those little office bins).
fill the basket upwith the food stuffs, then tip the whole thing into the compost bin-bin.
then just swill the bucket under the hot tap with a bit of bleach.
that's all i do (but mine goes in the garden)

we have one large black wheelie bin (large family size) which we have to crush down to get everything in.

one green wheelie bin, for all food, cardboard garden waste.

and three green boxes with black lids for cans, tins, glass and plastic.

i tried to do the small caddy thing in the kitchen, but with a large family that was emptied 3x a day, and we eat a lot og veg.

the worst part is in the summer, and the green bin was full of maggots and the things came out in the rain and swarmed out to cover the whole of the front garden, steps and my front door.

apparently you are meant to wash this bin weekly, but i cant get the bin around the back of my house, and dont have a garden hose, (kids keep braking the tap grip thingys etc) so could only wash out this great thing with a bucket.

also, some of the ..........erm , mush , doesnt come out when its emptied. so i have to SCRAPE the muck out (oh, and find somewhere to put it) , before i can clean the thing.

i dont have any spare cash to pay for someone to wash it for me, and even if i did, i think its the councils job really, there the ones that insist we use the bloody things.

i do recycle quite determinedly, we have a over flowing bin in the bathroom for all those plastic bottles, and nearly every day a tray with lots of tins etc from the kitchen gets tipped in to the small black boxes.

we often have extra seperate bags as well.

but, its a bloody pain the backside.

I did a lot of research into post consumer recycling. I came to the conclusion that it would be much more efficient and more environmentally friendly to have to waste sorted centrally. So people would put everything in one bin which would be collected in one wagon and taken to a sorting center.

We wouldn't need all these bins, or all the different collection vehicles and the resulting material would be of better quality as it would have been sorted professionally.

The idea of washing up cans in hot water in the sink so that they can go in the recycling is environmental madness.

So yes I hate doing it. It is wasteful and largely futile, especially the green/food waste. Just political window dressing.

Who are all these professional sorters trice? Doesn't sound like a very nice job. And my council makes compost from the food - you can buy it really cheaply at the recycling centre. Where's the issue in that?

Sorry I genuinely don't understand. If the rubbish truck is coming round, why is it more efficient for them to separate rubbish centrally than for us to do it (cost free) at home?

stop buying anything with packaging