Council recycling grinds to a halt

[Andy Burns]

But lots of them are foil lined.

[Rod]

For making hats?

[Tony Bryer]

For any UK charity you can look up the accounts on the Charity Commission web site. I think that the ones with a lot of grassroot support such as Oxfam, RNLI etc tell an OK story, but out of idle curiosity I used to check some of the ones that sent unsolicited appeals through the post and they did spend nearly everything on self-promotion.

[The Medway Handyman]

Same at our local tip, large metal container with holes in the sides. One side painted brown, other painted green - large signs 'Green Glass Only' etc - no internal divider.

[stuart noble]

And broken glass not allowed :-)

[Andrew Gabriel]

That wrecks the quality of the recycled paper. A tiny amount of contamination with foiled and waxed paper containers means the council gets almost nothing for it, and any more than that and it can't be recycled and will end up in landfill or being burned.

It's the foiled or waxed card which is the problem.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Recycling glass nto new glass was, like many things, something lots of people jumped on the bandwaggon before realising it was pointless. A lot of it is about making people feel they're doing something useful. The term "Driving to the bottle bank" is used as a euphemism for pointless recycling.

Used glass is pretty much useless to the glass industry - it couldn't be made pure enough. It piled up, until councils discovered they could bury it under new roads claiming it was recycled sand (which strictly it is), without being charged landfill tax, and that's what they currently do. It costs a lot more to collect it and process it into glass cullet than new sand.

Glass collection is a fascinating social service though. We have open boxes to put it in. As you travel around the town on collection days, you can see quite marked variations on the contents of the boxes. In some areas, the boxes are overflowing with belgium beer bottles, and in other areas they're overflowing with champagne bottles, and I mean overflowing every time they're collected.

[Doctor Drivel]

Re-cycling is a total waste of time - I don't do it under protest. It takes far more energy to collect and sort the stuff than to burn it and produce needed electricity. Stack scrubbers are now very advanced. Even the Defra web site had the low emissions of the stacks, yet councils were forcing people to re-cycle or be fined. Most things can burn. Incendiary is iron and aluminium.

[John]

Of course they are Andrew!! If the council are going to the trouble of laying on these glass collection services, the least I can do is to make it worth their while :o)

[Rod]

Why are councils looking for these facilities? Most of the time the councils are saying everything is contracted out - surely that would include the responsibility for handling what is collected? Or is it like so many contracts, the important bit is left with the council - only the remunerative bit is accepted by the contractor?

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember [e-mail] (Andrew Gabriel) saying something like:

The waste of people's time is what gets me - and especially if the glass is now worth nothing, hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel are wasted each year on useless trips to the bottle bank.

The old system of deposit returnable bottles did work quite well in its day; (fond memories of a tanner a jar and tuppence a bottle) kids are natural scavengers for that kind of thing, but nowadays it probably wouldn't work unless things get much worse.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Its a normal chain

Public demands green policies with no idea what that means stirred up by greenPiss

Government has no idea either, so slaps a landfill tax on

council sees taxes rising on it, so tells consumers to recycle bottles.

Cost of useless green policy is now firmly in the wasted time and fuel of the customer, who wastes hot water washing them as well.

Result. More energy and no recycled glass.

Just expensive sand.

[mick]

So that's North Ribble? South Ribble get a box for mixed plastic & metal, a second box usually containing cardboard & glass, a brown garden waste wheelie, a grey landfill waste wheelie & a blue bag for paper recycling (remembering to tear out the windows from envelopes of course!). The grey bin & blue bag are collected together and the rest on the alternate week.

Perhaps they ran out of boxes for us... :-(

[John]

Yeah, North of the Ribble (Fulwood). The council said that they'll also supply extra boxes/bins to anyone who needs them - I should be charging the council ground rent for all the bloody boxes/bins I've had to find room for :o)

[Alang]

My attitude too. When the council started this they just announced it with no consultation. Someone left a big green box outside my front door. I left it there. After a few days the wind blew it away.

[Dave Liquorice]

I think it would if you got 5p back on your empties. Might stop the local youth smashing their bottles around the Market Cross and shelter...

The argument that would be put up against it is that you'd have to have people coming round to to collect the empties. Note plural they would insist that each different makers bottle would have to be sorted by the store and collected by that maker.

The obvious way around that is for the empty delivery lorry/dray to take them en-mass bacl to the distribution depot were they can be sorted and the makers empty delivery vans can take them back to the maker for reuse.

[Rod]

Many, many years ago I worked delivering lemonade. In general, all the makers could use each other's bottles - with one exception. Only Barrs could use their own bottles (they had a twisty patterned bit on their necks) - but they could also use any other design.

We (not Barrs) used to get a few bottles, or even whole cases, of Barrs bottles on the rounds. Back at the depot they were generally put to one side. That pile grew and grew - and last I saw represented at least a full artic load. Barrs were asked if they would come and pick them up (free - we were not expecting to recoup the deposit that we had given to the shops), but they simply were not interested. No idea of the eventual resolution. But it certainly showed me that the system would never work properly unless the bottles were all the same (for a given basic size/type).

[Frank Erskine]

I doubt it somehow. Youth these days don't seem to be interested in 'small change' - in fact it might be seen as a sort of act of bravado to smash up things with a tangible value...

[<me9]

When my older kids were at the local comp, they supplemented their pocket money by (surreptitiously) picking up the change discarded by other pupils. The sort of deposit on offer wouldn't be enough to stop them smashing things up, unless the child economy goes itst up.

[Pete Verdon]

Yep - the one I had through the door the other day doesn't mention the word charity or make any reference to needy people at all. It just asks nicely for your clothes and leaves people to assume.

My old clothes get used for sailing, then general DIY, then painting/siliconing, then become rags or used for other purposes. I have an opened up rugby shirt acting as a curtain to catch sparks from my grinder rather than have them fly into the shelves next to it, and part of a pair of jeans forming a sort of hood to prevent sunlight shining into the back of my welding mask and making it hard to see through the dark glass.

Pete