...or is anyone else secretly fed up with recycling?

[Chil1234]

I do it, of course I do. Socially responsible, obedient, middle-aged woman, terrified of getting a big sticker on my wheelie-bin that I am - what choice is there? I've got the two-sided Brabantia for the compostable waste, I keep my reusable shopping bags in the back of the car, I'm even tipping the dirty washing up water on the plants to conserve that. But as I look at my little collection of rinsed-out bottles, cans and cardboard waiting to be sorted outside into their relevant bins, bags and boxes I can't help feeling a twinge of nostalgia for the days when you used to just throw stuff away and forget about it. I threw a dead battery in the 'everything else' bin this week and felt positively subversive.... yet elated.

Anyone else a reluctant green?

Yes. And the bin isn't big enough either so it's all overflowing quite nicely atm

I wonder about it too. There's us fiddling about with tins and envelopes whilst whole governments in some countries don't seem exactly enthusiastic about the environment.

I do do it though

Yes!! This always have me fuming - new house is better as we now have 2 wheelies and a glasss box for curbside collection but old place it was just one wheelie bin and a recycling box for paper. If you wanted to recycle plastic or glass you had to drive (wasting carbon) to nearest recycling 'centre'.

My worst 'eco-sin' is to use disposables though - tried reusables and did not get on with them at all.. and yes I own a car. I try really I do but I'm fed up with the guilt being heaped on me.

Oh it drives me friggin mental. We have a green box for tins, paper a white bag for plastic and three orange bags for garden waste, also a box for food recycling which we no longer have.

The food one was the worst, the council advise wrapping all your waste in newspaper which we duly did every week. I'd also clean our box out each time. Then instead of my own box I'd get some idiot's box who hadn't wrapped anything or washed it ever and it would have something undead in the bottom of it. Just the thought makes me want to vom. One week I just put the manky food box in the bin bag and have never used one again.

It does drive me up the wall sometimes.

We don't have the proper bins, just little boxes that are no way big enough to hold 2 weeks worth of stuff. And that is of course when the bin people decide to take it - they didn't take them a fortnight ago and so a month's worth of recycling is just mounting up on our drive for collection on Thursday! It's also very tedious having to wash everything out, etc.

But hey, we consumer societies cause most of the environmental problems in the first place so we have to do our bit!

We can't put yoghurt pots in our recycling bins but I still wash them. I really do not understand how you would not wash these things especially if like us you are on a 2 weekly collection.

No, but fortunately we just have to chuck all our recycling in one wheelie bin. If I had to sort and separate it all into different boxes I think I would have very much tired of it by now as well!

yes - nowhere to store it between trips to the wheely bin and the fact that a lot of the stuff doesn't even get recycled (allegedly) as some of the plastics they say to put in are just not recyclable locally (maybe in other parts of England?) but no room in other bin for them, which is always always full about a week before it's emptied

can't even take surplus to dump as got BANNED

I love composting so that's not a problem, just isn't ROOM for a double bin or two bins in kitchen

my cleaner says 'take it straight outside, why store it temporarily in kitchen' but really, who could be bothered to do that?

Bellabella, I can happily not wash out yoghurt pots as I am usually trying to pacify DS that all the pink yoghurt has gone. Do you really have the time???

I saw the thread title and felt a bit righteous 'of course I'm not fed up with recycling, Because It Is The Right Thing To Do!' [smug worthy emoticon]

But then I read your post, and it made me laugh, so YANBU

It's all ok until, like some have said already, the council are petty and refuse to take a bin because it has been 'polluted' by something mistakenly going in the wrong bin. I wouldn't mind, but we have 3 big wheelie bins to contend with and the one they didn't take is the grimmest containing food waste, paper and garden stuff. Magot city in this hot weather. And the crime - an empty milk carton that had gone into the green rather than the blue bin! We now have to wait another week for it to be emptied and in the meantime I had to get my rubber gloves on and retrieve said pollution or the bin still won't be collected. The other option kindly pointed out by the council helpline person was to take the bin (full, stinking etc) in our car to the local tip. Now there's an option I felt able to accept!

Rant, rant, rant.

It all goes to landfill anyway

Sorry Trixie ,luckily my son is now too old to cry over his yoghurt, pink or otherwise,but when he was of an age to do so we still washed them out.

totally. The cleaning, sorting, then the bin men don't empty them for the most spurious of reasons or alternatively, they empty half of them, or scatter the contents around our driveway, oh I could go on.

But I'm also fed up of explaining all the things they will and won't take as recycling to DH. So I'm fighting a neverending battle....

We don't have to sort, we have a recycling wheely bin, all goes in there. peasy

Yes I do it too but the piles of jars and bottles get on my nerves sometimes. Yesterday I was v lax and just threw some games still in their old cardboard boxes in the bin even though I should have sorted out the paper/cardboard bits to recycle.
I do not like the fact that people buy kids so many toys which are often plastic and hideous and come in boxes with loads of plastic and wire and all that nonsense. We try not to overdo it but our 7yr old feels hardly done by compared to his pals. Obviously when friends/relatives arrive with gifts we act v grateful but sometimes I just think not more junk for the landfill where do we store it?

The jars and bottles and stuff don't bother me as I just 'rinse and bung' as I go along. I've got a fairly high tolerance; use cloth nappies, wormery, compost bins, etc.

However...the maggots and flies in my garden waste bin today (the counci have started collecting food waste) were revolting (shudder) and if the new compostable bags don't solve the problem, I shall be putting my foot down on that one. Bleaching and hosing a wheelie bin is a job I don't want to repeat in a hurry .

YANBU, OP.

Our council takes paper, cans and glass - no probs there. We are happy to compost.

However, plastic bottles, cardboard, tetrapacks etc are very challenging. I go in fits and starts. I have a big plastic toy crate to put them in in my side return. I dutifully fill up that bin before taking them to Sainsbury's (after boak-inducing draining rincing of dirty rainwater). Quite often, the wind comes and whips everything into my back garden. The dog sometimes helps herself. The net result is that my back garden looks like a garbage tip. And at that stage, everything ends up in the wheelie bin.

Goodness I never realised it's so complicated in other aces
we're lucky too because we've always lived right next to a glass recycling place and now a clothes bin so I just chuck stuff in on the way to school
that way it doesn't accumulate in my kitchen

YANBU. When it was just old newspapers out to be collected and bottles in the bottle bank I could cope.

DH is like the recycling police and always finds out if I've sneakily thrown something away. The complicated system of what goes where bores me so much I can't even take it in. And stuff all over the draining board. I hate it.

Use tin, rinse tin while stuff is cooking, leave on the side until you next go into the garden/near to the recycling box, take tin with you.

Simples !

oh, some of you just have it so easy!! where I live, we supposedly have the biggest carbon footprint on the planet; recycling is rather in its infancy (and there are constantly rumours about it all just ending up in landfill anyway); trying to find anywhere to take anything that isn't paper, aluminium cans or plastic (PET) bottles is virtually impossible (I do know somewhere for glass, but it isn't somewhere I ever go for any other reason so do wonder about how ecologically sound that really is - and I don't know anywhere for food tins, other plastic, etc.

And I have never seen a recycling bin here that hasn't been 'contaminated' with the wrong sort of thing... which again makes you wonder if it really gets recycled.

And 'sort out some kind of composting arrangement' has been on my to do list for months (guilt....)

so yes OP it is a pain.

Not recycling as it all goes into one bin so easy for us. Also we have our recycling weighed so we can earn points for shopping vouchers, so I don't mind at all.

OTH I am sick of composting. I'm the only one who takes the food to the composter so it piles up in the kitchen till I can be bothered (in a pot but still its there). I made a big fuss of getting said composter so I don't want to lose face by saying I hate it and want to chuck it away. I wish my council collected kitchen waste for composting.

Our council makes it pretty easy to recycle plastic bottles, glass, paper, cardboard & tins.

They also encourage recycling of food waste and will take anything - cooked, uncooked, 'whatever has been on your plate'. Ok in theory.

They gave us a big green bin (also for garden waste) and a little kitchen caddy. That lived under our sink for a while, until the mice moved in.

Once I got rid of the mice, I put it just outside the back door (not nice having to dash to the green bin in the back garden every time we scrape our plates or peel veg, especially when it's raining/snowing/windy. Then some other nocturnal animal had a go at it and I got very fed up of washing the stinking thing out (compostable liners are v. expensive).

So now, although we recycle most of what we can, food waste goes in with the normal rubbish.

I suppose it has made us think twice about the food we waste when we saw how much went in the green bin though.

Does anyone rinse cat food tins? Ours all go in the landfill, I just find it too disgusting.

Oh, and I bought a compost bin from the council. It's full. And I can't be arsed to do anything with it.

I'm hoping if I leave it long enough it'll turn itself into lovely compost and I can just shovel it out and on to the garden