Our local recycling place for plastic bottles says No to other plastic containers. Why?

[Tinker]

I can see why, maybe, no to white/coloured plastic. But, clear plastic packaging? Can we ignore it and just put it in anyway?

My local council will collect quite a lot of stuff, but in the plastic collection it states that it will only take bottles and nothing else. I find this quite annoying, because even the little contact lens containers have the recycling logo on them, but the council says that if it's not a bottle they don't want it. If anything but a bottle goes in then apparently it "spoils" the whole bag.
The majority of my rubbish that goes to landfill is plastic packaging, and it drives me mad. You have reminded me to interrogate my council and get them to explain it to me.

its something to do with not having the necessary faciltites to actually recycle all the different types of plastic, they have different methods for different plastics. or some such annoying nonsense like that

it annoys me our council blue box recycling scheme takes bottles, yet they dont have bottle recycling banks at the recycling banks and they wont do recycling collection from our flats. so mine all have to go to ladnfill grrr

We have that here as well, it's because they only have the facilities to recycle certain types of plastics. If you look underneath the container, very often it will have the little triangle "recyclable" symbol with a number in the middle. It turns out that our council can only recycle plastics numbered 1, 2 or 3, and not the others because they don't have the facilities. Mostly it's plastic bottles, but a few other containers are also suitable. I put these in the recycling box as well and they take them.

Perhaps it's the same in your area?

were i live we cant recycle hardly any plastic,it annoys me.this is what our local recycle people say about it all.

I teach this at A level!! The plastics industry is ahead of the government in producing recylable material. They ahve managed to creat a lot of new plastics (some which disolve in water) but there is very little facility for recycling them in this country.

Also there are so many different ones, that no one is prapared to look at different ways of sorting them as they have to have the symbols looked at and then sorted. I believe some can be recognised by the ability to float or sink in water....but a long way to go yet...

From cheesesarnie's link:

PET - fizzy drink and squash bottles
HDPE - milk bottles and detergent bottles

Everything plastic with the recycling triangle on the bottom has an identifier as well - usually the letters but sometimes a number instead - I think these are 1 & 2.

There are plastic food containers made of PET & HDPE, & they will be OK to go in, but you'll need to point out the logo and stand your ground .

Meat trays are PP (5)
Muller corner pot is PS (6)
Tiny fruit salad container is other (7)

It's the "recyclable" juice containers like Tropicana that really annoy me as I have to bin them and we use a lot

At our ASDA there is a tetrapack recycling bin, but the other week I went to the dump (AKA HWRC) and they told me I could put them in the skip with other cardboard. DP doesn't believe them though!

Re tetrapaks - it depends where the collection point sends the stuff to. Some will send tetrapacks to one of the two dedicated recycling facilities in the country, which separate out the layers of card, plastic, and foil.

Others will send them to low-grade cardboard recycling places, where they make it all soggy, skim off the plastic/foil/useless bits, and make more low-grade cardboard. But obviously the recycler will pay less for this than for bales of better card.

All the demand and supply is constantly changing as more individual recycling plants and places using recyclates appear, so all you can do is follow your local rules.

As for bottles - bottles can be made out of many types of plastic, usually 1,2 or 5. But they may get separated from the rest of mixed waste using complex air-blowing or floating-on-water techniques, so an item that is rather different in shape/size to a squashed bottle might not end up in the right place. Not sure of the latest on this - trying to get an answer from my local waste firm, but it will vary around the country.

OK, it's obvious what I used to do for a living, isn't it? Happy to try to answer any other geeky waste questions...

our council (essex, epping forest) now take all plastics - inc lids, bags, food containers bottles etc. It is fab, you don't realise how much there is until you collect it.

Oooh, notcitrus, are you the MN queen of recycling?

So, if I put my PET strawberry box in with the plastic it might get rejected down the line? Our local recycling centre does take a variety of materials, I must get DH to give me a day out down there and see what they can and can't use. They do have battery recycling which is good (except that I never remember to put them out)

herbietea, our shiny new recycling collection is just about to start - ours can have glass, tins, aluminium & 2 sorts of plastic and that's it - collection from back street, once a fortnight, Tuesdays. Paper and cardboard go in white sack, collection from front pavement once a fortnight, Thursdays.

We don't have a garden by the council's standards so we don't get a green bin - any garden waste we have has to be taken to the tip along with all the random plastic. And no kitchen scraps collection at all - even though we have no garden - I mean logically, houses which don't qualify for a garden waste bin should have collection of kitchen scraps, shouldn't they, because they don't need compost? I'll ring the council and suggest it (although ours is not renowned for its listening qualities)

I spent £60 on our own recycling containers 2 or 3 years ago - they are a bit redundant now

Wendy, I abdicated from recycling a couple years ago but may well go back to waste stuff soon!
It's all a question of building more recycling plants once a potential market for the product has been found, and then collecting the raw materials for the new recycling plant. If you get it wrong you get headlines about rubbish being exported not recycled (if the plant opens late), or recyclate used for low-value usage (eg glass pellets used as road ballast, if the local market isn't there). So it varies by borough, step by step.

Your council might give you a green bin anyway if you say you don't have one? There's only a few organisations collecting kitchen scraps, because early schemes had big teething problems, and depending on where you live it may cost a fortune for someone to collect it at sensible intervals. The places that do collect seem to be focusing on workplaces at the moment, so they can get lots of material from one place. I can recycle batteries, CDs, and mobile phones at work, as well as all plastics type 1-7 if I wanted to take them in!

My council collects all paper and card, cans, glass, plastic bottles and tetrapacks, in orange sacks, weekly on the same day as the rubbish. I have a compost bin but it's nearly full. The council will give me biodegradable bags or reusable bags for garden waste and then you phone and they collect, but so many people want to do this now that they've had no bags available for the last 2 months...

Still, better than the councils that decided the most economic solution was similar recycling bags, but tough enough that they and rubbish could be collected in the same vehicle, so they only needed one lot of trucks and drivers. At the recycling centre, an optical sensor diverted orange bags to recycling and the rest to landfill.

Worked a treat. Except the public saw the same truck collecting recyclable and non-recyclable waste, jumped to the conclusion that "it wasn't really being recycled", and stopped putting anything out for recycling. They had to get separate trucks in the end.

Crikey what good councils

e have one blue bin for card and paper collected once a month and a normal rubbish bin collected one a week

They are showing no inclination to collect glass/plastic/compost stuff at all

Thank you everyone. So, it's wrong to just ignore the sign and put all plastic in?

Yes. The re-cycling guy from the council came to the school. He said the same that things with no. 1 to3 or 4 could be recycled in their bins, but he also said that it's to do with the way they select out the stuff that they could only do bottles at the moment. They are working on doing yoghurt cartons soon...

Apparently the other types of plastic turn to goo and mess up the recycling of the other stuff. He said'if in doubt, leave it out' which lind of makes you think why bother?

Milk bottles and PET bottles can be more easily recycled - see this - but it's set up for bottles only. Still a good thing tho given how many are used each year - 13 billion .

Our council take all plastic food containers except ones that have contained stuff like brake fluid etc (!) so we produce very little normal rubbish. Local recycling centre also takes tetrapak (although it's usually pretty full so you have to be a bit violent to get stuff in) I'm sometimes tempted to take the plastic stuff of friends who live over the border in another county where the council don't recycle so much stuff (I always have plenty of space in recycling bin) but I'm not sure if this is allowed .......would you lot do it?