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.

Trice - but it's no bother to rinse cans etc in the dirty washing up water when you've finished - no extra resources used then.

there's a company that does it.
can't remeber what they're called: something beginning with V, i think.
they've got blue vans.

I don't do the food waste caddy, just can't bear it makes me wretch just thinking about it.

We have to sort all our plastics/paper/bottles & tins/textiles into seperate boxes(in addition to aformentioned boak caddy)

On the next road along from us they get plastic sacks into which everything goes and is sorted centrally. Much more civilised.

We have a similar scenario to you OP. I think its a lot better now we have a big wheelie bin (rather than a stupid little box) for our recycling. However the fortnightly bin collections do my head in.

It was a nightmare over Xmas when the bin lorries couldn't get to us for 5 weeks, and when I phoned to ask why they hadn't come once the snow had all melted, I was told that it wasn't 'our week' so we'd have to wait another 7 days! Idiots!

The biodegradable bags are a must for the food waste bin. Although about 6 weeks ago DH stupidly put some bread in it loose. It is now green with mould and I refuse to clean it, and DH keeps forgetting. Will probably get a note from the council about it soon!

The thing that really pisses me off about recycling is that mostly it has to be taken to the big bins in supermarket carpark, but the fecking council never keeps on top of emptying them.
I can handle washing and squashing and all that business and arrive at car park with bags full of bloody tin cans, cardboard etc...
BUT
one of the bins is always full so you have to take the bloody tin cans back home
OR
they have removed one of the bins so you have to take the fecking plastic bottles to a different car park.
Why can't they have one car park with everything and bloody keep the things empty.
At christmas they put a notice in the local paper saying they wouldn't empty for a fortnight over xmas and new year... the one time of yaer people have a ton of waste, they decide not to empty them. The bins were all overflowing before xmas eve

I am not against composting, far from it; I have done the worm farm (disaster) and bokashi system for food waste but where we live a van comes round every two weeks just to collect peoples grass clippings which previously were composted in their gardens or left on the grass. It just doesn't make environmental sense. They do it so that they can reach the target for 30% waste by volume to be recycled. We can't recycle plastics or cardboard or magazines without driving out of town but they come to us to get our grass clippings. Madness.

I don't think you are being unreasonable to loath it, as long as you do it!

but why wouldn't people continute to compost their grass clippings? Are they really all shoving them in their green bin now?

That's perople being mental, nothing to do with recycling

That's different though trice. Our council collects ALL food waste and composts it. Because their massive municipal heap can reach far greater temperatures than mine ever does it means I can put stuff in that bin I'd never put in the compost. And even with my little garden I still make far more grass clippings than my compost bin can cope with.

So when you say you did a lot of research, do you mean into it generally or just into what your council does (which does sound rubbish (ho ho) admittedly).

Bins? What are these bins you speak of?

We are obliged to use black bags and have a fortnightly collection. You can imagine what fun that is in the summer or if for some reason you are unable to get your black bags out for collection on the appointed day.

Glass must be washed (so sod it, it goes in the dishwasher), no bottle tops allowed, card must go in paper bags which disintegrate in bad weather leaving a soggy mess on the floor. As for food, I have no idea as all mine goes in my normal bin which lives in a cupboard out of the reach of my greedy GSD. Given the council tax I pay my local authority is lucky to have me cooperating at all.

I did a degree in waste management ladybiscuit although obviously that was some years ago. I can still bore for england on the topic though.

I quite like it, I feel sort of cleansed when I do it.
Used to have to take everything to the recycling centre so now that it's all collected it's much easier.

It's a total faff PITA, I hate it but do it.

YABVVU. Doing it should make you think about all the crap you buy that you don't need. Anyway this is Mumsnet. You are supposed to care about your kids and their (bleak) future.

Really trice? Please tell me why it's better for them to do it centrally

Unless it needs a dissertation-length post of course! But I am really interested

Can we get a mumsnet campaign together for a better re-cycling system and less packaging in the first place?

Did anyone see that family on the news the other week who threw out something like one bag of rubbish a year? I'm impressed, and I bet she's a MN-etter

meglet - my mum and dad throw away about one small bag every fortnight. They recycle a lot and have a compost bin. But they don't buy much packaged food and virtually no processed foods. As soon as you start buying stuff in plastic punnets and cardboard boxes the bins fill up.

YABU
If you rinse before you put stuff in the bins, then you don't have a messy corner. It's just a corner with a couple of bins of clean packaging.

My children do a lot of the recycling. My toddler is particularly keen on rinsing.

You could be more picky about the packaging you buy.

It's a pity my grandmother (lived through two world wars and a depression) isn't around any more to give recycling tips. That woman wasted NOTHING.

Food scraps etc. were used to make compost. She had a giant barrel under the gutter to collect rain water, which was then used to water the garden. Old pantyhose was used for pretty much everything - instead of string or roap when tying stuff up, to tie plants to poles so they grew upright, to attach her keys to her bra so they couldn't get lost/stolen . Old washing up gloves were cut up into rubber bands (tons of different sizes - very big bands from the wrist or hand bit, smaller bands from fingers), and instead of buying new rubber gloves, she would wash out empty plastic milk packets, and then wear those on her hands (kept on by the rubber band made from the old washing up gloves). The woman was a recycling GENIUS.

Oh, and when it became illegal in South Africa to give out plastic bags for free, she cut up old plastic bags and then knitted them into a new reusable one.

we have two green(general waste) bins which are emptied every 2 weeks and 6 recyling boxes-of which 2 have to be driven 3miles to the nearest tip as they dont do plastic or cardboard.
I too refuse to do the food waste brown bins, they are utterly disgusting and I cannot cope with emptying/cleaning them and also maggots/flies/wasps in the warmer weather, its just not worth the stress and the smell. iirc they got put in the non recylable skip at the dump roughly 6months after we recevied them!
We also dont compost garden waste-again dont like the smell or insects, so this goes into the green bins-you can get brown wheelie bins for garden waste, but you have to pay an amount each year for them to be emptied and considering council tax is enough, I really dont see why I should have to pay for that too.

... Serenity: explain the plastic milk packets as gloves thing??? do you mean like tetrapacks???

old tights to attach your keys to your bra is pure genius.

Here's how I do recycling:
I have got a piece of furniture from IKEA under my kitchen window, which is designed for childrens bedrooms - it is a sort of wooden frame, into which 3 coloured boxes slot. We have only 2: the pink one at the top is for paper, and the blue one underneath is for plastics and tetrapaks.
Tins and bottles go in another bin, which has 2 compartments and a lid, and is kept behind the kitchen door.
Batteries and old ink cartridges I collect in a cardboard box which lives in teh sitting room.

Anything messy goes in teh dishwasher before it goes in teh recycling, eg yoghurt pots, or some tetrapaks.

When the boxes get full, we take them to teh recycling yard (no doorstep collection here).

Recycling is just part of life hwere we live (germany), everyone has old cardboard in their kitchens!
You might feel better about it if you got some better storage boxes to chuck it into.

shineone - I assume your children are not teenagers then??