OT: Bins with other people's wrong stuff in them

[James Wilkinson Sword]

veryone in the UK gets the same bin. It's included in the local taxes. = You'll be telling me you have metered internet connections next.

That used to be the case here until they supplied large bins with wheels= free of charge (twice the size of the traditional dustbin with handles = on the side that you picked up). Now you can fill that bin and no more.= Anything extra, stick it in your neighbour's bin, take it to the dump = (both cost nothing), or pretend you lost your bin and ask them for anoth= er, then put out two, they never find out.

I can understand it with commercial premises. But multifamily (I assume= you mean a block of flats), is just many houses in one building. It sh= ouldn't make the slightest bit of difference to the way it's collected. = There should either be loads of normal bins at the bottom, or a smaller= number of large ones totalling the same capacity. That's what I see he= re.

The special pickup here costs about =A330, so everyone just takes them t= o the dump in their car.

It's a matter of opinion. We're not currently saving money by most recy= cling, but we are prolonging the day when materials run out. Or maybe w= e're not, if we're using more energy and materials for the sorting and m= elting down processes!

They should in the 21st century have a sorting machine that can do all t= he sorting itself instead of us having to do it, then the binmen coming = more than once to collect different bins.

-- =

There was a rabbi who collected foreskins, had them dried out and made i= nto a wallet - whenever you stroked the wallet it became a briefcase.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Perhaps if you put all the mucky landfill stuff in with the recyclables, they end up dirty. And once it's been in your bin for a week or two, then taken to the recycling centre, it's caked on and cannot be cleaned. They ask us to clean our recyclables anyway. It's easy to rinse a yogurt pot under the kitchen tap, but once the yogurt has dried on, it would need scrubbing, or some kind of powerful hot water jet like a dishwasher, which would just melt the pot.

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

Spouts the unemployable life long dole merchant who is cheating the system with his delivery boy job. No running hot water, no money, no woman 11 cats, several birds and can't afford to buy disinfectant for his stinking hovel. Dark days have arrived have they not Hucker? Best you apply for a council flat now, wanker.

[Taxed and Spent]

We have mixed stream recycling - a vast improvement to the old days. All recycling into one bin. All trash (including kitchen gunk) into another.

Commercial establishments are going even further: mixed recycling, trash, organics/compostables (kitchen and garden, mostly). Very little is going into the trash bins.

[gfretwell]

The only places that are like that in my county are rural without a paved county road. The haulers don't want to lose a truck for a part of a day while it gets extracted from a muddy road. They have big dumpsters up at the end of the hard road.

[gfretwell]

We have a couple of cities with the 65 gallon bins but maintaining the trucks that handle them seems to be a nightmare. We have a 65 gallon recycle bin and they get dumped by hand these days.

The economy of scale makes the dumpsters easier to handle. The small ones dump into a big truck and the big ones just get swapped out. For the user it is the same whether you throw your trash bag into a separate bin or the dumpster.

[gfretwell]

The whole thing is stupid. There are only a few places, very close to a reprocessing plant where plastic has any value at all and then it still needs to be spotless for them to take it. Our recycling company here says they end up sending most of the stuff to the landfill because it is not clean enough to give away. If they only collected drink bottles it might make sense but food containers are just trash.

The only thing that really pays it's way is metal.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Our standard wheelybins for garden waste, landfill waste, and recycling, are all 63 US gallons. They always have been since they were invented in about 1990 (although it was just landfill ones back then), and I've never heard of any problems with the lorries. They have a twin mechanical lift (for two bins) at the back. The men just hook the bins on, then press a button. It hoists them up, waggles them a bit to make sure the stuff falls out, then lowers them back down, takes only a few seconds.

Agreed, but my point is there shouldn't be a difference in how many there are or who pays for them. Each premises should have the equivalent of a 65 gallon bin.

[Frank]

Municipalities thought they could recover a lot of their expense by selling the recycled material but there is so much of it that demand has gone down and prices are low. Paper is also in lower demand because of less need for print media with internet and electronic document storage.

I'm familiar with plastics recycling. First you have to separate into the different kinds of plastic. You can't mix PET and PE for example. In the case of PET bottles, you would chop up the bottle and separate the paper label, if it has one, and the PE cap by flotation in water. There is a lot of crap remaining in the PET polymer flake and it cannot be melted to make bottles or fiber as color is bad. Normal recycle is to basically re-polymerize by adding glycol and taking back to monomer and then completing polymerization. Then the product goes back to make something like tire cord where color does not matter.

[Frank]

Small development I live in of 22 houses on maybe 20 acres does not have municipal trash collection and we have to pay. At least three different companies service us and two separate trucks come in for each weekly. With only one entrance and two cul-de-sac streets, besides residential and postal delivery, garbage trucks are the next biggest traffic.

Internet connection is not metered but we also have to pay for it.

You pay for it too along with the bureaucratic government baggage administrating it.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Where did you hear that fallacy? Everyone still prints everything. I even knew a secretary who printed every email.

I saw something on TV once about a Japanese (I think) bloke who had invented a way to make energy from ANY plastic. And it wasn't just burning it. He did something remarkably clever, I just can't remember what.

[James Wilkinson Sword]

You'll have more out of the way places than the UK, but even our remotest places have standard government funded bin collections. Some places do charge extra for garden refuse collection (because you're expected to be able to compost it yourself), but that's all.

No, we buy it privately, but almost every deal is flat rate nowadays.

[My 2 Cents]

My current do-gooder project is to pick up the weekly free newspaper someone tosses on the front yards. I walk the dog a mile most every day and when I see one on the city side of the property line that's obviously been there a week or two I pick it up and put in someone's trash cart as we walk along. I must have picked up more than a hundred of them in the past couple of weeks. Just something to do as we walk and it's kind of a self imposed community service, for things I never was caught doing when I was much younger. Coming soon ... picking up the plastic bottles (no deposit here), then the empty cigarette packages. Recycling was tried here and all it did was add an extra layer of handling things on their way to the landfill. The old recycle bins good laundry baskets.

[Frank]

Print media is still active but down. Here's a reference I just googled from your side of the pond:

The head of our county library system told me that most of the people that come to the library today are there to use the free internet.

You can get books from our library by downloading them for reading on a Kindle. I don't do it because the book is only good for 2 weeks and you have to renew as if it were paper. I have a lot of books on my Kindle but they are free out of copy right but prefer paper. Lot of people do buy electronic books today.

I cannot think of any way to get energy out of any plastic without burning it.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Some plastics are easy. You can segregate milk bottles, soda bottles and detergent bottles as they are big and the material is known. The rest not so much. They should be pulverized to reduce space and save transportation and burned in a trash to energy plant. Most plastics are anout 18,000 BTU per pound.

[gfretwell]

They have those hook lifts on most of the trucks but the guys usually just pick them up and dump them because it is faster ... or so they say. The other trucks that they have so much trouble with have a clamp that extends out, grabs the bin and dumps it There is only one guy in that truck, the driver.

I am not sure how many people will be using the 5 or 7 yard dumpster in those places but if they over fill them too often, they bring a bigger one. A lot of the multifamily places do not fool with recycling.

[gfretwell]

You know metal prices are low because we don't even have "scrappers" anymore. It used to be, anything metal would be gone in a day if you set it on the curb. Now it just sits there until the trash man comes. (even aluminum and copper). The good side of that is people are not stealing AC coils and ripping all of the wire out of vacant houses.

I think they just burn it here. We are at least 1000 miles from the nearest place that can process plastic. I suppose they ship a token amount, just to keep the enviros happy but it is not economically or ecologically efficient. My guess is that comes from places with inherently sorted stuff like sporting events and fairs where they have cleaner recycle bins. The household bins are full of trash, plastic bags, old garden hoses or whatever people think might get recycled. If it is too bad, they just dump the whole truck load in the landfill. That is according to the people at the recycle center.

[gfretwell]

If you live in Florida you would be generating a lot of compost, far more than anyone would need. After (hurricane) Charlie they took an 18 wheel trailer and a half out of my yard alone.

This would be a weekend of yard work

This would be a major tree thing (I bought this dumpster)

Ours is flat rate too but some providers cap it at some big number like a TB a month. Mine is unlimited. I am not sure how I would use a TB in a month anyway. That is about 1000 hours of movie streaming and there are only 750 hours in a month.

[gfretwell]

My public service is picking up all the trash we find in the river and on the bank. Same type of thing. It all goes in the trash except the occasional aluminum can.

[gfretwell]

It may be some kind of fuel cell.