Will anyone be joining the DM campaign?

[ballbaby]

Here
I have two los, one in disposables (sorry ) and we only fill half a grey bin every two weeks. I try not to buy things in excessive packaging, and recycle whatever I can. Not difficult really.

Fio has an SN child, vim.

We'll have two soon, Fio, as we're having to move out to the sticks in order to ever have a hope in hell of saving money.

I'd consider not having a car if the public transport was any good.

Or existent at all. We'll be five miles from town and there's no bus or public transport.

we have just gone back to weekly collections here FFS again we have a kerbside collection of recycling but it is a bit pathetic, no card and very little plastic and even when we did have fortnightly rubbish colections the recycling was only fortnightly also
I agree how difficult is it to seperate your waste, I manage it with a largeish household, we tend to only have one bag of landfill rubbish every fortnight.

We'll be in the same boat, Fio.

We've got debts to pay off from the time the Tax Credit Office f*&ed us over, and we can't really afford anymore rent increases here, so we need to move on whilst we can.

DH already has to use his car for work, and he'll be driving about the same distance to and from work as he does now.

I'm looking at a part-time gig - basically taking over our landlord's old job that she's leaving behind - that will require me to drive people around in my car.

Talking about burning rubbish, my neighbors who are incapable of dealing with their ENORMOUS amount of waste have suddenly taken to burning it-furniture, paper the lot, in a heap-I thought it was illegal in London. Last week they burnt a whole shed, set fire to my fence and singed my huge tree in the MIDDLE of MY garden, which is now all brown on one side.

This is in a council WITH weekly collections, and recyling bins, and separate food/garden waste collection, plus a big street cleanup where they take away anything for you, for no added charge every 4 months. You just have to put it in their skip that they bring.

We are hoping to sell up move when/if DH gets his promotion, so we daren't complain.

The problem here is that the council don't give us doorstep recycling for bottles/tins/cans/plastics. So it means a trip (almost daily) to the recycling banks a few streets away. The plastic bottle bank will only allow white or clear plastic bottles, and they must have just had drinks in them. So all the plastic bottles that I have had cleaning products, shampoos etc in have to go in my grey bin. We can't put in other plastics either, like yoghurt pots or plastic packaging from say mushrooms. Yet my mum's council allows her to put all plastics of any colour in their recycle bins. Also the brown bins for garden waste, well we can't put kitchen waste in those now either. Where the bottle banks are there is also a cans bank, but again it's only drinks cans such as coke, beer etc that can go in it, yet if we drive to Dundee there is one that takes tins as well, such as tins that have had tomatoes or tuna in. ALL councils need to make it the same regualtions for all recyclable waste. Us driving to dundee to dispose of tuna tins isn't doing the environemnt much good!
We also get paper and cardboard bin collections every month. We can put any type of cardboard, paper, envelopes, magazines, phone books, etc in our paper bin. yet my mum can only put papers in hers. If i was able to recycle ALL my plastics,ALL my glass and ALL my tins then my bin would a lot emptier

I live in a tenement flat and they've just brought in recycling bins. As my delightful neighbours can't even manage to get their rubbish in the ordinary bins (someone has actually been chucking Tesco bags of rubbish out their window into the back court [angry) it was a vain hope that they'd get used.

Sure enough, some arse tried to force their ordinary bag of rubbish through the tiny hole in the top of the recycling bin, bag burst, food waste etc all over the back court and the Housing Association had to get in private contractors to clear it.

There's no sense of responsibility for even keeping their back yard clean never mind helping the environment. I'm all for a great big stick as I can't think of any incentive that will change things round here.

If they bring in fortnightly collections without some sort of cctv system so they can catch the mingers in the act we'll be up to our necks in festering nappies & baked bean tins this summer. Nice.

There used to be a nosy old biddy lived on the stair (well not on it you understand) and she kept us all straight. She was a right pain at the time but I'm seriously thinking of taking up the position...I'm too scared of some of them though .

I have to lock up my recycing bins or my neighbors empty ashtrays and hoover bags in, over all the sorted stuff. Don't know what I'll do when I go back to work FT.

My cousin gets fornightly collections and they have to keep thier bins locked in the shed because people were filling neighbours bins with extra rubbish because their own was full

If you don't have a car (cos it's 'greener') and the council don't collect half the stuff that you are able to recyle, how the hell do you get it to a recycling point?

Sorry but the council ARE utter fuckwits. When I moved house and called to let them know I was the newer owner and needed to register to pay council tax they told me I didn't even live in that borough but a neighbouring one! They don't even know which fecking roads they cover! Eejits.

Saltire, don't joke, we have elderly neighbours both sides so if we end up with fortnightly collections we could well be dumping stuff in theirs! Mind you, we have done this at christmas and asked beforehand - they don't mind. One side often borrows our green bin cos they do so much gardening.

Your council and our council are one and the same by the sounds of it, GDG.

I just keep scratching my head and thinking, 'They get paid for this?! Where did I go wrong?'

"If you don't have a car (cos it's 'greener') and the council don't collect half the stuff that you are able to recyle, how the hell do you get it to a recycling point? "

Bolly truck - you see you'd be recycling that old pram and no carbon emissions, need no licence or driving lessons, attach your bin to the back and there you go

how green is that?

We've had fortnightly collections for a while now and in the summer it's awful because of the maggots and flies everywhere. The bins are always full, and having 3 children who wear nappies doesn't help.

No vegetable peelings are allowed in the brown bin as this apparently counts as food waste. The council sends trucks round for the garden waste bin all year round, even though most people here have tiny gardens and do very little gardening in the winter. If the idea is genuinely to recycle more then why not collect the recycling bin weekly and only collect garden waste bins once a month or something? Like other posters on here, the range of materials that our council will recycle is very limited. No glass, no egg boxes, no tin foil, nothing that's had cleaning materials in it etc. You can't blame people for thinking it's to save money rather than the environment.

Agree with ExPat about this. Everything to do with global warming, recycling, carbon emissions, etc, is just a load of politicians worldwide slowly rubbing their hand with glee in realization that they've just hit on something else to screw us over.

I can't think of anything more disgusting than only having your rubbish collected once a fortnight. Recycling is, for the most part, an illusion. Nowadays I can't walk along the pavement without having to navigate around boxes of crap for this and cartons of shite for that. The only traffic on our high street in the middle of the day is the endless rumble of recycling vehicles.

People in our local wards have been sorting food/plastic/paper, etc, for over a year now into an assortment of little containers ... only to find out that the companies contracted to dispose of it had been sticking it in the landfill all along.

Load of old bollocks, in my opinion.

Actually I think the politicians are behind informed public opinion on this.

Global warming is terrifying and the scientific community have been leading the way on this, the warnings have been getting louder over the last twenty years at least while generally the politicians have looked the other way.

Fortunately more and more of us are raising our voices on this and demanding action.

Re. landfill, in the UK we'll have filled up our available space in nine years time. You can be as cynical as you like about politics and politicians' motives but it won't change that fact.

Often the reduced trash collection is to pay for the mandatory recycling.

The bottom line is that people need to change their habits.

People are used to sticking everything in the magic dustbin and never seeing it again. If twice weekly collections shatter that illusion and make people reduce their waste, that's no bad thing.

Councils are pushing recycling to meet their EU targets. They are not doing it to save money - recycling schemes cost them more than landfill.

Would you prefer that they carry on with landfill until there's none left - what happens then?

What are you putting in your bins that attracts "vermin and disease". If it's food waste why don't you manage your food shop better so you're not throwing so much away?

We have an excellent fortnightly recycling scheme - glass, metal, plastic, cardboard and garden waste. Rather than whingeing why not write to your council to ask for better facilities?