Like many households we have a separate glass container collection bin that is collected fortnightly. So bottles and jars go in sometimes after a quick rinse if they contain a mucky residue. Happened to notice that a jar from Lidl which contained Frankfurters has the legend and symbol “Do not recycle” on the label. Anyone know why? What is special about the jar.
GH
Might have been referring to the contents
No idea. In general, borosilicate glass (Pyrex) cannot be recycled, but I can't see the jar being made of that as it would be too expensive.
Can’t think why they might use Pyrex but I believe that’s not suitable for recycling.
Tim
Can't help with that, but we have a different recycling problem.
Our LA uses large woven plastic bags for a range of materials, including a blue one for cardboard. Over the years our bag started to fall apart due to hard use - so we asked for, & received, a replacement. Then it was a question of "What do we do with the old one?" The obvious answer was to recycle it. We put it into the appropriate container. The bin men carefully removed it from the container, and returned it to us... Rinse and repeat. It is apparently impossible to recycle a recycling container.
LOL
It is so much easier in our area (East Yorkshire) because *all* recycling (glass, hard plastic, paper/cardboard, tin cans) goes in a single (blue) bin and does not have to be kept separate inside the house and then put into separate bins/bags for roadsider collection.
The only thing that is kept separate is food waste and garden rubbish which both go in a brown bin. That works in our favour because the food waste *had* to be collected every fortnight, and now *has* to be collected every week under a new Government scheme, so the side effect of that is that we get weekly collections of garden waste all year round. And we got them all through Covid.
The East Yorkshire scheme gets high levels of recycling (and low levels of landfill) because it is so easy and is not micro-managed. It should become the national model for all councils.
I still have to take excess garden waste to the tip at times when we do a lot of pruning, but even that is under cover: you drive up a ramp to the first-floor of huge a covered shed and then tip the garden waste, cardboard, wood, metal etc into separate skips at ground floor level. It pongs a bit in a hot summer, but at least you never get wet when it's raining, and you don't have to climb steps to reach the top of each skip.
Where we lived before (North Yorkshire) we had a tatty "plastic-hessian" bag for cardboard, but it was so small that you had to rip cardboard boxes into small pieces - you couldn't just rip the edges of the box and put each side in whole. Cans and bottles were in a plastic crate with an ill-fitting lid which usually blew off in the wind, allowing the contents to blow all over the road.
One way to improve recycling further would be to remove the requirement to wash bottles/cans/foil trays before recycling. When I've finished with something, it becomes rubbish that I want to get rid of and it is a real pain to try to find space in the dishwasher for bottles and trays - or to wash them by hand. Those things tend to go into landfill on the basis of "too f-ing hard to comply with the rules".
A EU directive forbade the recycling of jars [1] not intended to be recycled. Kilner jars intended for reuse are fine.
[1] It is down to the wording and their interpretation. The WI stated, for a while, that home made jam should not be sold in 'recycled' jars.
Our council will collect the green bin (food waste) every week, but from June, if we want to carry on putting garden waste in it, we'll have to pay an extra £50 a year and have a garden waste sticker on the bin.
They tried to introduce this some years ago, but many people decided to go halves with neighbours or just take it to the tip themselves - with the result that they got far less money than they expected and they abandoned the charge.
I shall go back to using my round bin for garden waste and taking it to the tip when I take other stuff.
Could it be a translation problem from German? Could they mean 'Do not reuse'? I think the bottled water says not to refill the bottles.
We pay extra for garden waste removal here, and I don't think that's unreasonable. Neither do I think the opverall service is bad, notwithstanding what Our Nige may think. We very often don't put any bins out because they are nowhere near full, so often it's a month between black bin (landfill) or recycling bins going out.
Here, food waste and garden waste, if you pay for it, is collected weekly (240l Green bin); non-recyclable waste fortnightly (140l Grey bin); paper and card monthly (240l Blue bin); bottles, tins and some other plastics fortnightly (240l Black bin). So over 4 weeks, it goes Gn/Gy, Gn/Bu, Gn/Gy, Gn/Bk.
They don't seem to be very clued up about UK recycling. I've tried asking them (Lidl) whether their tea bags are compostable* - no answer yet but plenty of 'we'll get back to you'.
Is why we continue to use loose tea. We compost all raw vegetable waste here, but cooked and meat waste (bones, etc) gets handed off to the food recycling/composting system.
I know there is a garden waste collection here but we have never used it. Everything is either composted, shredded & used as mulch, or split for firewood.
On 08/04/2025 13:59, NY wrote: <snip>
</snip>Do you have a reference for that new government scheme? I'd love to be able to wave it at our council, which only does fortnightly collections.
Andy
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