Recycling - Canterbury CC don't collect glass!!! - does your council?

[greentown]

Perhaps not so much a property topic but was just so exasperated by this I thought I'd check others' experiences.
A relative has just moved into Canterbury City Council's area and found out that while they collect your landfill/black bin bags and your gardening refuse, and paper & plastics for recycling --- they do not collect glass of any sort, bottles jars nothing!!!
People have to take all their glass to bottle banks and the bottle banks are no more numerous than anywhere else.
Is this usual?
I've been living in SE London for years and our glass has always been collected by the council. Perhaps I've just been spoilt.
Canterbury seem to either expect people to walk their bottles to the bottle bank (not so easy if you're old - and/or have lots of glass and the recycling centre is a long way away) or drive there (top marks for the environment) or put the glass in black/landfill bags - bad for the environment and why would you with such a valuable commodity!
I'm really surprised as I've not come across this sort of waste collection policy before.
Can only imagine whoever negotiated this particular contract didn't know much about recycling or was having their palm generously greased.

That's odd, and unusual I'd have thought. My Mum is just down the road from you, under Thanet, and gets glass collected. Ours does, but we're in London.

I wonder it depends whether the company with the recycling contract can take mixed recycling - e.g. our tins plastic and glass all goes in one box. The council have recently found someone who will recycling more mixed plastic so we can recycle virtually everything.

Kirklees (Huddersfield, West Yorkshire):
Glass, paper, plastic, tins, garden waste on doorstep collection.
Tetra paks, foil, batteries you can take too tip. Battery recyling boxes in some libraries.

No glass collection for us either in Suffolk (we're not rural either)

Am also in East Kent and no glass collection here either.

I think you get a bit spoiled in London - I got used to rubbish being collected twice a week and all my recycling collected, including food waste. Here it's rubbish one week, recycling the next

Ours collect glass, but where we go on holiday (north Norfolk) they don't, and also other stuff we recycle at home isn't allowed in the recycling there.
I can remember when we first went to norfolk; their recycling was so much better than ours, but now seems to have gone the other way.

Don't collect glass here, Reigate and Banstead (Surrey)

No, we don't have doorstep glass recycling either (Mid Wales), we have to take it to the bottle banks; we don't have garden waste recycling either. We don't have bins though, both recycling and non-recyclable waste are put out in bags, which would make recycling glass difficult as any shards would cut the bag.

They don't collect glass here either , Carmarthenshire , Wales .
Black sacks ( landfill ) one week , maximum of 4 , blue sacks the other week , paper, plastics , cardboard , as many as you like .
Food waste caddy emptied every week .

Not collected here either (West Lothian) - they decided to go for a wheely-bin recycling collection, with big bin lorries and mixed recycling. Which means you can't include glass as you'd end up with broken glass through everything else!

I don't think it's ideal, but presumably someone decided that was the best % recycling for the money they were prepared to put into it.

I always harboured the illusion that glass must be a really straightforward recycle and basically money straight back into the council coffers. After all, in the past we used to get money for returning used bottles, so I thought it was a fairly well-proven system.
I'm really shocked/disappointed that councils are fecking about with recycling contracts/policies like this.
Let's face it, if you've got even ten bottles/jars a week, and the choice is walk a mile to a bottle bank, drive a mile to a bottle bank or stick them in with your landfill waste, there's a fair percentage of people who won't have the ability/means/time to get to a bottle bank.
Just seems wrong - when it's so simple - it's not as though we're talking about some complex polymer which requires sophisticated recycling technology - it's glass! Bloody hell!

We didn't get glass collection in our area in Kent. Had to take it all to the recycling bank at the local supermarket. Together with plastic.

Am spoiled where we have now moved to as we have a recycling bin and everything can go in it - cardboard, paper, tin, glass, plastic, clothes etc. I love it.

We have always recycled anyway but do way more now.

Ours only started taking glass recently, and mixed plastics. Until then we couldn't send margarine tubs or yoghurt pots, only plastic bottles plus cardboad and paper.

General non recyclable waste one week, a wheely bin, mixed recycling the next week, one wheely bin also but you can have a larger bin or smaller box on request.

Well the "returning used bottles" was about re-use rather than recycling - they were cleaned and refilled, not crushed and remade. Milk bottles and fizz bottles - but they came from one supplier and went back to them, so it wasn't lots of varied sizes and shapes the way it is now.

A lot of recycled glass is actually used for low-grade stuff like road fill, below the tarmac, so I don't think it has much financial value, or really reduces the use of raw materials for new bottles.

I can accept councils/recycling plants find plastics hard to recycle because of the difficulties in separating containers made from different chemicals/ingredients.
But glass - it's like Clear, Green or Brown - what could be simpler?

Why are so many councils ignoring glass? I've heard the UK generally has 'room for improvement' compared to some parts of Europe for recycling but I didn't realise we were still at the "Um... should we recycle glass stage?"
There are some things which I think should just be imposed by central government because I can only put this down to bizarre 'local' behaviour.

Our collections are really good-
we have a black wheelie bin for rubbish
a green wheelie bin for garden and food waste
a green box for tins and glass/ aerosols/plastic
a white bag for cardboard and paper

we are due to get 2 smaller wheelie bins for the tins/glass and for paper/cardboard as the bags blow away and the boxes ae too samll to last a fortnight
the council also take clothes and shoes for the RNLI
I live on the FYlde coast

"But glass - it's like Clear, Green or Brown - what could be simpler?"

This is why the kerb collected glass is used as hardcore for building work (I think). To be reused as glass it needs to be colour sorted so unless you are providing a kerbside box for each colour, it's not as simple as you say.

our local Tescos has recycling skips by the entrance. They also take batteries and carrier bags.

No extra journey required to walk or drive there as we are likely to be going past as least once a week. Your green credentials would be very dented if you gave the family bus a special outing to take six bottles in.

A plastic crate in the boot of the car will accumulare recycling with no risk of spills or drips

I suspect that recycled bottles are almost worthless and it might cost the councils more to collect them.

My parents live in south Wales where they collect pretty much everything.

Here in SW Cornwall they take glass, tins and newspapers. That's IT. And different parts of Cornwall, where they pay exactly the same council tax since Cornwall went unitary in 2009 despite 90% of people not wanting it, they have similar provision to S Wales. Makes me rant.

But councils like mine which made one decision about how to do recycling (mixed collection, wheel bins, big lorry) would not be able to suddenly switch to also collecting glass without a huge cost. They would either have to add a whole new collection just for glass, or they'd have to replace their current recycling collection - a whole fleet of lorries, and the bins to go with them. Central government can't come along at this stage and say "You have to do this, and tough if you don't have the money for it" when 5 or 10 years ago they just said "You need to do more recycling to meet EU targets, do it however you like".

And they'd probably argue that they do provide facilities for recycling glass, plus lots of other things, at their "amenity sites" which are open long hours, blah de blah...

I'm in Kent (Maidstone area) and they don't collect Glass. when I lived in Medway they did - you jsut got these bue bags and everything went in them. It seems to just depend where you live.

i'm in north manchester and we have 4 wheelie bins.
brown for food and garden waste
green for paper and card
blue for glass, plastic bottles and cans
grey for landfil.

we have a 4 week rota for collections which is a right pita, wk 1 blue/grey, wk2 brown wk3 green/grey wk4 brown etc etc

Can't believe people are still disputing the value of recycling Soupdragon and Piglet John!
Defending a council against the difficulty of sorting green, brown and clear! Have you read the complex ingredients of your plastics. And the varieties of paper and card?
Glass is not worthless, and there are lots of people out there who don't have cars to swing by Tesco with their crate of bottles, still I guess those pensioners should just load up their shopping bags on the way to the bus stop.