...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?

That sounds very civilised!

Not available here unfortunately. Just spoken to lady next door, and she's got a smelly bin as well.....2 weekly collection of food waste in the summer really is not on!

I do it but I hate it, I hate having boxes of assorted rubbish all over the place. I hate having four big bins taking up my entire patio. We had a big family party a couple of weeks back and had nowhere to move them to that was away from people. Pleasant . And I point blank refuse to use the food bin since last summer when I opened it and it was crawling with those things . In my KITCHEN!!! Never ever again

Completely sick of it esp as our area don't so plastics, and we get thru 4pints of (plastic carton) milk per day, not to mention yoghurt pots and butter tubs etc. We dispose of more plastic than anything else. They no longer take cereal boxes in case we haven't removed the plastic bag from inside - I tried opening mine out flat, inside out, to show them I have removed this, and they still left them all.

We rarely use tins or have cans, we rarely have bottles and we burn all paper in the fires, so recycling is pretty non-existent around here

We used to have:

Green bin & blue box collection days and
black bin and black box collection days.

Now (after a move from city to county) we have green bin weeks
and green box and black bin weeks.

Shortly to be replaced by black bin weeks and green bin and blue bin weeks!

And we have an 'anything on your plate' kitchen caddy but I'm not so zealous about that now after the acceptable paper bag liner split when I was lifting it in to the bin and I had to scoop rank rotten food waste off the shared parking area with my bare hands bleugh and gag.

so no, YANBU, though I will continue to do it.

All the boxes and bins are a pita as well.
I've got a big garden and DH built a covered fenced off area for ours. I do feel sorry for those with less space or anyone living in a terrace who have to bring bins through the house.

Actually, going on from what Ormrenewed says, I do prefer to reduce/reuse than recycle. For instance, the carrier bags we sometimes end up with. They do a few days as a recyclable plastic/steel liner, then graduate to being a nappy bag.

But I struggle to think of myself as achieving anything much when I am still putting 4-5 nappies a day in a bin, despite the recent articles suggesting that the net impact of disposables/washables is roughly the same.

We have had a new recycling scheme for 3 weeks now, we have

a bag for foil and plastic
a box for card and glass
a box for paper
a food waste box

I find myself standing in the midle of the kitchen bewildered, wondering where to put the rubbish! ahhh!! {grin]

apologies for spelling mistakes.

Druzhuk- think of it as damage limitation. It would be worse if you weren't doing it, and I think you have a good point that it's just as important to reduce consumption/ re-use as to recycle.

Wandsworth council have a great scheme. 1 big orange bag for recycling paper, plastic bottles, tin, cans and glass, no need to separate everything, just leave it out on bin day. Brilliant.

YANBU, I am fed up too. We don't even have kerbside collections, except for glass, so most stuff sits in the boot of the car until I get round to taking it to the recycling point. Very irritating having a boot full of crap.

MichyInge "can't even take surplus to dump as got BANNED"

What did you do to get banned from the tip? Or is that a general thing rather than you personally? If so that is one of the stupidest things I heard - I mean councils might want us to recycle more but if they make it difficult for people to use the tip then that will just lead to fly-tipping.

I don't think I mibd the recycling as such. What I mind are:

• fortnightly collections - especially in warm weather when your bin can stink however careful you are
• the space all these wretched containers take up.

Yeah, Rushcliffe have similar: we have a blue bin for paper, card, plastic and metal. They a green bin for garden waste.

No bloomin' glass collection service, though ... how rude. DH really gets the hump with my tower of glass in the garden. I know there are loads of glass recycling banks outside supermarkets, but I get my groceries online - I am so rarely near one.

lazy

Wouldnt mind so much if the government actually targeted manufacturers to reduce packagaing in the first place or promoted the use of better alternatives such as the milk bags.

Or for that matter stopped the supermarket monopoly and allowed traditional "milk men" and greengrocers and butchers to actually make a living instead of driving them out of business.

I´ve skimmed the thread and mumsnetters horrify me today!

Recycling is not an "optional extra" in life but a completely necessary evil, just like time "wasted" cleaning the house or on personal care.

I´ve lived abroad for many years and always notice the quantity of rubbish people seem to generate in the UK, the fact that the rubbish bins are HUGE, the fact that people complain bitterly about stinking bins only being taken away every other week. Sorry, but I have absolutely no problem with this and live in a warmer climate. And have 2 children in disposable nappies. If you want to generate huge amounts of waste then you also have to be prepared to dispose of.

FYI, my mother-in-law has got her weekly non-recyclable waste down to almost NOTHING, an amount that fits in a (reycled) bag from the fruit/veg section of the supermarket. I aspire to that personally.

our recycling is dead easy.. if it can be recycled it can go in blue wheelie bin if it cant it goes in grey. Garden waste goes in brown wheelie

But I still find it a faff.. I dont have room for recycling bin/bucket in kitchen I start to pile it on the breakfast bar and then get fed up and bin it

We had a blue box for glass but I had put broken glass in it and got moaned at ... I asked them what I was supposed to do with it... answser .. put broken glass in the blue wheelie bin

So... I just throw my wine bottles in the bin really hard!!

GBhome I don't think anyone has said it's an opyional extra. Just that it is a horrible job (which it is) especially when a lot of councils make it very difficult to recycle

GBhome feeling a tad tetchy today? Good for your MIL. Presumably she lives alone?

"the quantity of rubbish people seem to generate in the UK"

"If you want to generate huge amounts of waste then you also have to be prepared to dispose of"

Are you under the impression that people choose to generate waste?

Anyway I had a good method of dealing with waste. I and all the other tax payers got together and employed people to deal with it just like you pay plumbers and so on.

If you pay someone to build a brick wall they don't get to demand that you mix the cement and carry the bricks for them.

I am the opposite - recycling makes me feel really good.

It's a brilliant feeling when I wheel the wheelie bins onto the driveway on rubbish collection days and the recycling bin is overflowing, the worms are well fed, the garden is thriving with worm compost and the actual rubbish bin is only half full.

A small sense of environmental accomplishment.

I pick up random peoples rubbish on the street and recycle that too - so I must just be a saddo

I feel better about it now we have moved into a house, where we have one bin for rubbish, one for recycling, though it is a shock that each only gets collected once a fortnight.

Before we lived in a 1st floor flat, where the was a bin for paper, a bin for glass and a tiny black box which I was never sure was for but was supposed to be for 9 flats

So where were we supposed to store the zillions on plastic milk bottles we went through while finding the time to take them to the recycling bank? No garden? Tiny kitchen with no window.

Yup.

That's why I don't do it.

Of course the fact that I live in a city centre flat with a trash/recycling room that is locked between about 5pm and 9am and during the weekends has something to do with it as well. Especially since signs have gone up asking people to not leave their trash/recycling outside the door.

So everything goes in the bin in a black bag and down the shoot.

Oh well.

Someone else can save the planet. I can't be arsed.

::dons flame proof suit::

"Recycling is not an "optional extra" in life but a completely necessary evil"

But you admit it is 'evil'.... QED, I think.

Bumperlicious There really is nothing in place for people living in flats.

Tee that's insane! Where else are you meant to put it?

I do the recycling to the best of my ability, but always remember the 5 Rs

REJECT
REPAIR
REDUCE
REUSE
RECYCLE

Recycle is actually the LAST resort, we need to change our ways so that we don't have so much to recycle. Big business is trying to convince us all to do recycling, so that they can claim to be helping the environment etc., while still making maximum profit. It is cheaper for them to use fresh plastic and shiny cardboard packing, in small portions, than to use recycled, or the old way of selling bulk packs to the grocer, and horror(!) you take your own bags or baxes.
It would be better to re-use the plastic trays etc. rather than melt them down into other unnecessary stuff (mainly bags and boxes to store the recycling in).

BTW I'm saying I think about this theory, but life is too short, so in pracise this small household still produces a lot of recycling. I am shocked on a weekly basis by the amount of CARDBOARD which surrounds our food.

We have 5 different containers for our rubbish- it is ridiculous!!

Whellie bin

Food bin

plastic bottle bag

Paper bag

cans and bottle box

They all go out on different weeks- so not only do we have to sort our own rubbish into five different containers we also have to remember which week each one is collected- and then they wonder why everyone hates recycling and just shoves it all in the wheelie bin.