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.

GetOrfMoiLand - YANBU at all!

The dirty little secret of recycling in the UK is that none of it would make any economic sense unless householders are forced to do a lot of the hand sorting of recyclable materials into the relevant domestic bin.

If all the hours householders actually spend sorting rubbish were properly costed the total cost to society would exceed the value of the recycled material. The entire household rubbish recycling industry depends on the 'free' unpaid labour of householders.

ALL household waste in this country should be incinerated, the heat used to generate electric and heat offices/homes and the metal collected and recycled from the residual ash.

ABetaDad - and the reason that almost anything in the west is so cheap to buy, from plastic bags to computers, is because we don't (currently) have to pay to get rid of it once it's chucked... factoring in environmental clean-up costs into the price of goods would mean much lower consumption. at the very least, much lower consumption of packaging, which is completely useless most of the time anyway.

I banished the big blue boxes into the garage and use a plastic lined bamboo one in the kitchen. It isn't an eyesore like the blue bins, and we just dump the recycle stuff into the blue boxes when it is full.
There is a small counter top green bin we line with biodegradable bags, which we tie and drop in a large green bin (that we keep outside the door) for garbage and recycle pick up.

We've got the foodscraps bins too- I've never used them, as I have a dog.

We don't do food recycling (Spelthorne). I don't mind recycling, but I would like some evidence that what we go to the trouble to sort out is in fact recycled. (I beileve lots of glass goes into lanfill)

But, what does annoy me is that they reduced our collection when they brough in recycling so now I spend my saturdays driving crap to the dump when I pay then council tax to do that for me? Seems they should come get it or give me a refund. And then they moan they don't have enough money. Well, what have you done with the money I gave you to collect the rubbish/recycling you didn't collect?

Our local authority collects virtually everything. You must take it to a central collection point. I get really cheesed off at the pile of recyclable stuff in the corner of the kitchen. The cans that aren't aluminium must be washed, have both ends taken off and flattened. I just put them into the ordinary rubbish now. I've cut myself once too often.

unpaid labour of householders? To take responsibility for their own crap?

What a rotten society we live in.

pointy - it is easy to say that recycling is a worhwhile activity if we ignore half the cost. The value of the recycled paper, plastic metal and glass is easily seen in market prices for those materials. It is that market price that provides the revenue that many councils found attractve and provided a lot of initial impetus to recycling schemes (I know there were laws and targets too). However, if councils had to build really expensive sophisticated recycling plants to accept and sort mixed household waste it would not be viable. That is why in my area we have a very complicated recycling scheme that specifies precisely how householders have to sort their rubbish.

The council saves money by not having to build a complex recycing plant but instead forces residents to do complex hand sorting instead and not paying them for that work. That sorting takes a lot of time and effort. I would say about 30 minutes each week per household.

If the council had to pay £3.00 per week for my half hour of effort at minimum wage that would be £75 per year per household (i.e collection every 2 weeks). That £75 multiplied by the total number of households in my area adds up to �£7.5 million which is far more than the net income after costs that our council has raised from selling recycled waste last year.

The full cost to society of recycling is never talked about. I therefore think recycling is a PITA because the net economic income generated is worth less than the value of my effort in doing the pre-sorting. It would be economically much better to just throw it all in one bin, incinerate it and collect the waste heat and scrap metal as I said earlier.

We can only know that though if we work out full economic costs. The Govt and coucils do not do that analysis so we have stupid PITA recycling schemes instead.

Don't even get me started on the full economic cost of nuclear power or wind turbines!!!!

We shouldn't expect pay for everything we do.

I do laugh at you calling it complex hand sorting. Not complex for my brilliant mind

God, I hate it too. Our collection only includes cans , newspapers and bottles.
So all milk cartons and drink cartons I need to take to the local re-cycling centre. No composting or bones/meats bits here. they go in the bin.

I don't blame you LeQ - imagine it must feel liberating to think sod this for a game of soldiers and just bin everyuthing.

They check our bins and refuse to collect if they are 'contaminated' in any way with the wrong type of waste or the lid is up at all.

It gets more and more like a police state in the UK and hence me and DW have plans to leave for New Zealand.

We just cannot stand it any more.

Our bin wasn't collected once because the lids wasn't closed properly. There was about an inch gap.

Plus everyone had the same size bins - there are 3 in our house, house across road has 7 people in it, house next door a single man. Yet we are all expected to have equal amounts of waste.

Interesting ABetadad what you say about incineration - I watched a doucmentary a couple of years back saying that incineration plants were discouraged in favour of large scale recycling plants.

I am slightly about the value of recycling and reducing carbon footprint in this country and the wholesale guilt we are encoyraged to feel about the whole subject. I have seen the state of pollution caused bu heavy industrial actitity in Chongqing, so I kind of think that we are pissing against the wind with guilt re using tumble driers etc.

Agree and disagree with Beta. Yes, for recycling to make economic sense, it does rely on the willingness of householders to do unpaid labor.

My point earlier in this thread is that in Los Angeles, where my mother lives, they simply put all the items that can be recycled into one bin and it gets sorted elsewhere (food is not recycled). There is another bin for garden waste and another for general trash.

Makes me laugh though. We got a big sticker saying our box contained plastic (not collected) and in future wouldn't be collected.

But next door don't bother recycling and just chuck it into the general trash.

ABetaDad, you can't escape it, it's everywhere. It's being trained to jump through hoops. Periodically they ratchet it up and add more hoops.

Are you joking? Time-consuming? All you have to do is give things a quick rinse, or a quick stamp and put them in the bin. Job done.

Have you nothing better to worry about?

I am sure I saw a programme before which commented that there are 3 or 4 different types of plastic types, and even if people have sorted generally their recycling into boxes, they are useless like that unless someone else then goes through and finely sorts them..

I just have this sense that we spend ages sorting things out into general boxes and then they will all get dumped at the other end back into one big incinerator, landfill or whatever..

Me cynical... nahh..

Surprise, ... if it were just a 'quick rinse' that would be fine. but it is not a uniform policy per council. As I said much earlier, the instructions I got from mine had about 15 different points on it, and tells you what you can and cannot do (for example, apparently the junk mail that comes in on coloured paper cannot be recycled at all according to whatever method my council uses.) I put in rinsed empty milk bottles, but also put in that little aluminium cap that comes with it, and got a written reprimand and informed that next time I failed to adhere to the rules I would be fined 'up to' £150.00. So you bet I say sod it now. Everything goes in the black binliners.

We used to have really hard recycling.. boxes for this boxes for that.. none of them big enough. Dont know anyone who bothered

Then they changed it.. we now have blue wheelie bin for anything that can be recycled except food. The funny thing is if you have glass bottles they are supposed to go sperately but broke glass goes in the blue wheelie bin. So I put my wine bottles in assuming they will get broken in the lorry! and a grey wheelie bin for stuff that cant .. simples

everyone I know in this area does it now

Total PITA!

Do it religiously though.

Paper, cardboard, glass, plastic, garden waste, food waste.....

If I don't sort it, along the the normal household rubbish, Aged Mama makes INCREDIBLY heavy work of it all. Ties up newspapers and cardboard with twine in immaculate little parcels worthy of Harrods gift-wrapping department. Scrubs out and sterilises all the cans and squashes them, ditto plastics, instead of just rinsing and lobbing 'em into the boxes. It takes her about 2 hours to sort it and she gets incredibly stressy and anxious about the whole business.

DH just puts everything into the wrong boxes and sacks, which means they won't get collected.

Gosh, I love recycling .
It's so very satisfying to know that so much stuff will be channelled somewhere productive and not just thrown into landfill.

On the other hand, I hate mopping and tidying up after DC. If only someone could do my general housework and I could do their recycling!!

If recycling were such a fantastic thing there would be commercial firms coming round knocking on your door and offering you cash for your recycled material. They don't because it really s not economically viable.

TBH it only made some sense when the recycled plastic could be shipped to China in empty shipping containers for further sorting by very poorly paid people indeed. Now we are shipping less goods from China there are fewer shipping contanrs empty being taken back to China. I heard recyled material is being stuck in warehouses by councils because no one wants to buy it. So much for recylcing being worthwhile. Empty gesture political correctess gone mad.

Most scrap metal is recycled (e.g scrap car bodies) because it is worth commercial firms doing it. Metal recycling has been going on for centuries without Govt telling anyone to do it.