OT Paper recycling question

[F]

I suppose they would get *brownie* points if they went through the motions to recycle them...

And they do recycle sh*t round here. To farmers.

[Martin Brown]

A farm about 5 miles away did that one year. You could smell it on the wind when it blew in the wrong direction. He practically made his nearby village unliveable with the smell and was black balled for it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, it now goes to Tyne and Wear, where they need the jobs, instead.

[tinnews]

We have a 'brown' bin which is nominally for garden waste but also allows cardboard and shredded paper which apparently goes into the compost too.

[dennis]

It is possible to sort glass mechanically. You use optics and compressed air to select pieces after its been crushed. Similar mechanics are used to sort the waste I put in our recycle bin. The other bin is for "dirty" stuff that they don't want contaminating the recycled stuff.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Kerbside sorting - pioneered by Islington IIRC. Not having the householder have to sort the recycle waste gets the highest recycle rate, but having workers do it at the kerbside also makes it the most expensive recycling scheme.

Ours do. It may well end up in an incinerator though.

Of course, burying paper and cardboard in the ground is the opposite of digging up coal and burning it, but logic never comes in to such considerations. It's always someone's blinkered target over a holistic understanding of the whole picture.

[dennis]

Not always. We can dump all our recycling in a wheelie bin that they empty weekly. It then goes to a sorting plant where much of it is separated automatically. Far cheaper than kerbside sorting and just as easy for the householder.

I would suggest that Islington is wasting taxpayers cash if they are still doing it.

[Martin Brown]

It seems to me that the larger the city the weirder and more inconvenient for householders their waste recycling scheme.

Although for my money Salford takes the biscuit with no fewer than four full size wheelie bins for every household. Household waste is black, the "green" garden waste bin is a lurid shocking pink, blue is for cardboard and paper and brown is for glass, cans and plastic.

Any advance on four full size wheelie bins per household?

(I have seen a few others with smaller bins of many colours)

[Tim Watts]

Let's think about this:

Chomp the waste up into crumbs and either put it in an air blower or a water bath. Either way, glass crumbs and metal sink, plastic floats and paper will float more or become slurry.

Metal and glass are easily seperated by magenetic techniques - so the only two problems I can see are:

How to seperate grades of plastic - maybe the mix goes to some crap use that doesn't matter?

How to cope with kitchen waste in the equation as IIRC Harrow do? Other council's answer to kitchen waste is to shove it in the garden waste and use composting farms that get the temperature reliably high to kill evil bugs.

So I can almost see how automatic recycling seperation could be done - love to see it explained properly through.

[John Williamson]

At the depot, more likely, then they ship the container to China to be sorted and sold back to us.

[John Williamson]

Cans, glass and plastic are easily separated automatically. Eddy currents generated by AC electromagnets (Essentially laid out as linear motors) drive the metal off the track, and the glass is dense, so it isn't blown away by the air jets or lifted by the fluid flotation methods used to get the plastic off the track. Sorting different plastics can be a right pain in the backside.

Ferrous and non-ferrous metals are easily separated, although separating the non-ferrous stream into useful fractions is not so easy, and both streams need the steel and iron to be clean, i.e not fastened to non-ferrous bits. Pop rivets or pop riveted assemblies tend to be a problem, as there's usually a steel core inside the aluminium tube.

[Bill Wright]

When it happens I ring the council and complain, of course.

To be honest with you I've never flytipped in my life and would dream of doing so. But I think a lot of people will do so and will feel justified because of the absurd rules that councils impose. And it won't make any difference how heated you and others get because the fact is, flytipping from cars can't be traced unless the culprit is daft enough to leave something that can be identified, so it will rise in proportion to the silly rules. There's absolutely no way it can be policed, so the only way to keep it down is by keeping people's co-operation. Once people feel that they're being got at they really do lose all finer feelings about things like flytipping.

Just for the record I'm fastidious about not even dropping litter. This afternoon a babywipe fell out of my van door and I chased it a few yards so I could retrieve it. In the rain!

Bill

[Jules Richardson]

Around here they just have recycling points here and there - paper and cardboard in one, glass and plastics in the other. AFAIK it gets sorted at the local tip[1]; I have no idea how or what they then do with it all, though.

[1] except that at the tip they want you to separate out corrugated card from other card/paper, yet this isn't a requirement at the scattered recycling points.

(refuse collection is an optional service here, rather than being bundled in with the equivalent of council tax)

cheers

Jules

[Bill Wright]

Oh you didn't misinterpret me. I was being deliberately provocative and saying something I didn't mean. It's a little weakness I have!

Sorry.

Bill

[Brian Gaff]

Yes, I wish our council would do this. However I gave up recycling as the firm are a health and safety nightmare for blind people, just chucking bins and bags into the property from the street and I damn nearly broke an ankle. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

They ban shredded paper here, and at the moment I have a lot of this so I used to do it via a neighbour, but now I don't as they chucked it all out last time.

brian

[Adam Funk]

Ah well, you succeeded and/or were asking for it!

(I'll try to bear that in mind next time.)

[Steve Walker]

Ours has a 140 litre grey bin for non-recyclable waste, collected every week; a 240 litre green bin for garden waste (we can also put food waste in it) that is collected for some form of accelerated composting every fortnight; a 240 litre black bin for glass bottles, plastic bottles and tin cans, which is collected once a month; and finally a 240 litre blue bin for paper and cardboard that is collected once a month. Which all works out as the grey bin plus one other bin each week and seems to work pretty well. Although I did get close to emptying rubbish bags into the council offices when they failed to collect our grey bin (along with a number of others) one Wednesday, then failed to answer the phone after I got home from work (even picking it up an dropping it back down to lose the call), making sure I could not call until Thursday morning. On Thursday when I got through, they said it would be 48 hours before they could empty it, but as that put it back to Saturday (due to their failure to answer the phone), it would actually be Monday or possibly Tuesday. I pointed out that our bin was completely full, we were a houshold of five and two of the kids were still in disposable nappies and it was the height of summer, but it did no good. That part of the "service" I am not at all happy about - especially as 50% of the wagons serving other areas drive past the end of our road every day!

SteveW

[Hugh - Was Invisible]

My mother has one place for all recyclables which makes it very easy.

We have: A grey bin for non-recyclables. It would take us about a month to fill it.

A brown bin for garden refuse

A box for glass and cans

A sack for paper

A sack for cardboard

Disposable bags for plastics

An inside waste food bin with corn starch liners (not suitable for warm or wet food) that are transferred to an outside bin.

We are just a couple but only the food bin goes out regularly for hygiene reasons rather than because it is full.

Our collections have so far been very reliable but the costs involved must be horrendous.