In article , snipped-for-privacy@dircon.co.uk writes
And garden waste, which our local council has started collecting every two weeks for composting. The compost is then sold back to Joe Public at two quid a bag...
Without thinking about the detailed economics, somebody has at least thought about that and turned a problem into an opportunity.
Ours has done the typically stupid thing of being willing to collect one bag per week, or you can buy special bags from them. However, you have to go to the council offices, where there is no parking, to buy them for a pound each. Either that, or take the whole lot to the tip.
I thought old fridges were inefficient, so it would be environmentally unfriendly to keep it in use even if repaired. Fridges that run but don't cool usually do so because they have leaked some or all of the coolant gas already.
BTW I have 3 half-full cans of foam filler, with the nozzles bunged up. I asked my council if they have a hazardous waste facility for these, they said to chuck in the wheelie bin. Does this sound wise?.
Egremont.
Apparently, clear glass is the most valuable of brown, green and clear glass.
However, if bottle banked clear glass is contaminated by more than 7% with coloured glass then it is not worth so much. (7% figure is taken from several years ago - it may have changed and may vary from location to location).
Many local authorities would offer brown, green, clear bottle banks. However, all the glass would be emptied into one single truck because joe public is too stupid to put the bottles in the correct banks. The glass is then sold as mixed.
Graham
Apparently, with old fridges there is more cfcs contained in the insulating material than there is in the refrigerant coolant system itself. Merely draining off the refrigerant - which is relatively simple to do - does not solve the problem.
The bulk of the cfcs in the fridge will be released when the fridge is broken up or crushed.
The proper machines designed to recycle fridges are airtight. The fridge goes in one end through an airlock. The machine is crushed and any gasses released from the insulation are trapped within the machine and then stored.
Graham
It would be an expensive, although amusing wheeze to put a load of these or a large one into a wheelie bin in the hope that the crusher would pierce them, thus leading to a huge expansion of said stuff in their wagon that they then have to deal with.
All the ones I've seen do.
Maybe that varies by location?
Yes, of the two local councils I'm familiar with, one does this and makes a profit out of it, which is fine by me. The other one charges £25 for a bag which lasts a year and is collected every other week. I suspect most people just hide their garden refuse in the regular rubbish.
It's looking like most councils will be changing the regular refuse collection to every two weeks over the next year.
I monitored a refuse & recycling contract for three years. You are right to be concerned. In the last ten to fifteen years, local authorities have been cutting back on refuse collection services across the board because they are obliged to meet strict recycling quotas. This has given refuse contractors carte blanche to be as picky and fussy as they like about what they will or won't pick up. You can waste hours on the phone to the local authority complaining about these issues, but the only way that you will achieve any change is to lobby either your local councillor or the committee responsible for the service, ideally with a petition signed by others. If that has no effect, try to get the local media involved, because nothing scares an elected councillor more than the thought of bad publicity.
Fridges, cars, DIY material, car batteries etc etc - although local authorities are obliged to provide facilities for disposing of these things, there are allowed to charge. It used to be that second hand car dealers would fight over the rights to impound abandoned cars - legion are the stories about backhanders thrown to highways inspectors in return for scrap cars - but now no one wants them, what with the low cost of second hand cars, so the councils charge high fees just for scrapping a vehicle, because the car dealers don't want them anymore.
Taxpayers who can't drive to amenity tips are being discriminated against because they have to pay extra to the refuse contractor to collect bulky items. This effects the poor, disabled and elderly. Of course it's all wrong but you can only change local policy by lobbying politicians.
For years local government ignored the issue of recycling. These were the golden days when binmen would collect anything. Then when the horrendous cost of recycling was suddenly realised, swingeing cuts were made to the general refuse collection service (along with cuts to street cleaning and similar grounds maintenance work). To make matters worse, so much is now being recycled that the value of recycled paper, glass and metal has tumbled, meaning that local authorities get far less income than they had budgetted for.
In article , Andy Hall writes
I agree, though can't help idly wondering whether the benefit to the environment is offset by the manufacture and distribution of the half- ton woven re-usable plastic bags for collecting the waste (distributed free to every household, whether they wanted it or not, by the council), the fuel used by the trucks to collect and empty the bags, and the fuel used by people going to and from the central point used to distribute the resultant compost.
My suspicion is that all this garden waste is weighed and used by the council to offset the tax they will be paying on recycling vs. landfill ratios next year, as mentioned earlier in the thread. And as the bags are open and the waste gets wet, it weighs more...
Typical council mentality.
Our local tip has a crusher for "green waste", which is presumably also composted. I used it a lot earlier this year, before the collection service came into being.
In article , Andrew Gabriel writes
Me too, as long as it goes into local services or is used to reduce council tax.
I think this is acceptable as long as provision is also made for recycling refuse that would otherwise have gone into the bin (paper, glass, garden waste, etc.) so that the bin doesn't fill up as quickly. Judging by the bins on collection day though, I suspect that some families will have trouble. We're still on weekly collection around here.
Yet another of the large, and increasing, ways in which the State extorts taxes for a service, then fails to provide the service. And another example of behaviour which if it were the private sector, would be illegal.
[13 lines snipped]You're a tad out of date. The price of scrap steel has gone back up to the point where it is economic to scrap cars again, hence all the ones abandoned by the roadside have vanished.
[6 lines snipped]The message contained therein being that recycling is generally speaking a waste of time.
It seems that nearly all local authorities still collect the glass separately. However, it can end up all being transferred into a single lorry.
A friend who worked for a local authority said he was unaware of any local authorities who were able to offer clear glass than was less than 7% contaminated.
It doesn't surprise me. I regularly see idiots using the bottle bank who stick the whole lot into just one bank.
Graham
Never mind, the police will be too busy picking up 17 year old smokers to do anything...!
Recycling is just very badly managed in this country. The Govt reacts in a knee-jerk manner to last minute deadlines.
I recall more than one occasion when several lorry loads of paper were landfilled because the paper mills were so swamped with incoming material that they were unable to take it. That's the sort of c*ck-up that occurs when strategists plan short-term.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@cucumber.demon.co.uk (Andrew Gabriel) saying something like:
I've regularly seen the collection truck tip all 3 bottle banks into the one opentop trailer. Makes a mockery of the whole thing, imo.
I know of one council that apparently bought new bin lorries that didn't fit the wheelie bins, so replaced the wheelie bins and (allegedly illegally) landfilled the old, recyclable plastic bins.
Local authorities have the business acumen of British Leyland.
Owain
This is out of date. A bare bodyshell from the average car is worth about
25 quid these days. And of course the dismantler may make more by selling secondhand parts.
The council can't win.
If people mix the glass then there is no point taking the glass away is separate lots. This is waste.
If people see the glass being mixed by the council they might conclude that there is no point sorting the glass when they put it into the bottle banks.
Graham
It was recently suggested that within the next 10 years all the land fill sites will be full.
My partner and I used to produce around 1 wheeley bin of rubbish per week.
We now recycle our paper, cardboard, glass, steel and aluminium. We now produce 1 wheeley bin of rubbish per month.
Graham
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