[OT] refuse - what's the point?

[Peter Lynch]

We've just had a ring at the door. It was a scruffy looking individual in a yellow hi-vis vest (among other clothing!) and an I.D. badge carrying out a survey on behalf of our local coucil about waste collection.

My pet hates are: (you can skip this bit, it's just me rattling on, but sadly will probably generate the largest number of replies)

- the local council do 4 collections every 2 weeks, but they don't collect glass. They should[1] - The number of rubbish bins we have inside the very small kitchen, reflects the way we have to segregate our waste. So instead of having just one kitchen bin, we now have many (the unit that holds them I made myself, so there is a DIY connection afterall). Now we need 5 bins in the kitchen: "food" waste, non-recyclable, paper, shredded paper, tins & plastics, oh yes and glass. Make that 6 bins. Each one takes up space that is in short supply. - fortnightly collections DO create smells and maggots. Even in our regularly cleaned compostables bin. OK, back to the main topic .... Now during this laddie's survey I was ranting on, as I do. He was just standing there. I asked if he wanted a pen to write any of this down, and got the response that he'll write it down later.... Um, yeah!

So, a pointless survey, with no reliable results paid for by our council taxes. No doubt when/if the results are delivered, they'll either be a randomly remembered collection of single word topics, or they'll just support the view the coucil wants to promote. Isn't local democracy wonderful

[1] yes I know about bottle banks (been using them for decades). If that's the answer, why not go the whole hog and cancel doorstep collections for all dry waste? If you think rubbish is worth colelcting and recycling glass should be included too.

[Tim Southerwood]

Peter Lynch coughed up some electrons that declared:

Harrow have a very sensible idea (have friends there). They now have 3 standard sized wheelie bins: brown for garden, black for general crap and blue for ALL recyclables (glass, plastic, paper, metal). I guess they have worked out an efficient way of bulk separating these.

Very easy on the household IMO and makes recycling much easier.

Tim

[tim.....]

Collecting glass manually is dangerous. I can understand why they don't want to do it.

And whilst you're ranting on. This morning I went down to our communal bins (which had been emptied yesterday) and two of then were already completely full.

Some bugger had thrown away four large boxes and couldn't be bothered to squash them up. I took them out and put them in the recycling shed. The bins are now empty again.

Why are people so lazy.

tim

[Stuart B]

I agree that Glass should be collected as well. Where I live in Glasgow they just delivered shiny new blue bins and wil take cans.paper and plastic but not glass so I still need to go elsewhere to get rid .

I take it you DO have a garden as u mention "compostables bin" ?

Don't you put put your food waste straight in to a compost bin or do you keep it in the kitchen first then transfer it .I was wondering why/how you get maggots ?

[Peter Lynch]

We put food waste in the compostible bin every day or so to stop the kitchen from smelling. It's a pain to have to go outside (esp. when it's raining) every time you want to chuck out a bananna skin. The maggots appear only in the outside bin, even though we:

1.) rinse the bin with a couple of kettle's full of _boiling_ water 2.) pour in some bleach 3.) upend the bin to make sure the inside is completely dry.

We've even found them in the "non recyclable" bin, which is kinda worrying since AFAICS, there's no food/organic material there to sustain them. Maybe they've mutated to eat the tough stuff we put in there. Now that would be a problem, if we've accidentally bred a strain of insect that will live on plastics.

[Andy Hall]

What a complete waste of everybody's time. The survey is simply so that they can claim to have done a consultation - although clearly it's as useless as the service that they are providing.

Frankly, they should simply forget the whole idea of householders doing recycling at all and provide what they are being paid to do - i.e. removal of domestic rubbish. If they wan't to separate it into different categories, sell it, bury it, burn it, ship it to China or whatever, then they should deal with that and not waste the time of the householders.

[Grunff]

I couldn't agree more. I cannot stand this whole "you need to separate your waste into 14 different bins" approach. It's crazy, and I suspect of anyone carried out a full process analysis they'd find that it used a lot more energy than simply separating the waste at a central location.

[Stuart Noble]

Separation can only realistically be done by the householder, and I can't see anyone's time being significantly wasted by such a simple operation. Whether any of it makes sense is another matter

[John]

In Derby: Blue bin for glass, plastic (most) and cans

Brown bin for shredded paper and cardboard, compostable garden waste, vegetable matter

Black bin - all other waste for land fill.

Glass must me the most recyclable material there is, so I can't understand why all councils cannot collect it.

Incidentally, I don't like the term "fortnightly collections" - they are weekly but with a fortnightly cycle of what is collected.

Personally, I find it easy to just put jars and cans into the sink for a rinse and then take them straight out to the blue bin. We only have one bin in the house - for general waste that goes into the black bin.

[Clive George]

Spoken by a man who has an inate appreciation for the second law of thermodynamics :-)

cheers, clive

[Stuart B]

So you are not actually making compost then outside ? otherwise you wouldn't be using bleach ...Now I am confused .

[DM]

I'm right next door in East Dunbartonshire and the council have been recycling for some time now... although they did take a big hit at the last council elections that was attributed to the fortnightly uplift of the regular rubbish.

We've one large green bin for garden waste and then another two separate containers. One for glass and tin/ali cans and the other for paper and bottles. These combinations are relatively easy to sort automatically.

Food waste goes straight into the regular black bin, good for methane generation at the landfill site. If they can call a pile of windmills a wind farm then I don't know why the landfill operators haven't rebranded the landfill sites as methane farms yet. :-) ...Might help to lower their tax bill.

cheers

David

[Stuart Noble]

If you say so :-)

[Andy Hall]

If you multiply the number of households by the amount of time, it is hugely inefficient.

Centralising it would allow the development of appropriate technology for separation of what is worth separating and getting that correct. I really don't want to waste my time looking at funny symbols with triangles for different types of plastic when a machine could do that perfectly well with suitable markings on packaging, or better still, use different packaging.

Ah well....

I had an invoice from an electrical supplier today with a line item for a WEEE levy charge. Quantity 2 @15p each. I queried it. It turns out that this is a new government charge for lightbulbs and certain electrical goods:

• Fluorescent Tubes * Low Energy bulbs * Mercury, Metal Halide SON & SOX, bulbs * Most Commercial Light Fittings * Electrical appliances including Fridges, Microwaves, Fans and Heaters.

These were some low energy bulbs that were purchased for outside use (I won't have them in the house).

As a matter of principle, I have returned said bulbs unused and asked for a credit. Incandescent bulbs will be used.

[Grunff]

WEEE applies to all electrical and electronic household items. As a retailer, we've had to join up to the central takeback scheme. This is essentially an additional tax, no more. We've chosen not to pass this on to the consumer directly.

[Andy Hall]

It appears that retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers are adopting different strategies for handling it ranging from explicitly showing it as in this case, to adding it in to the price to absorbing from margin.

This one struck me as a distinct lack of joined up thinking. If the government would like people to use specific product types then it ought to be incenting them to do so not taxing them.

[Broadback]

I compost, therefore I have refused the "garden" bin, I even compost paper. I do not have a wormery, therefore cooked kitchen waste goes in the council bin. The bottle bank has a notice saying "only bottles, no broken glass", odd when I toss my bottles in I hear them breaking. I refuse to wash out cans and bottles, this is surely worse for the environment than throwing them away. Why cannot our council do as they do on the continent, burn waste and use it to generate electrickery?"

[John]

Our council (Preston City Council, in Lancashire) will give you as many boxes/bins as you want - you just have to ask for them.

In the kitchen, we have just one standard pedal bin for general landfill stuff and all recyclable stuff gets left on the window-ledge (after any necessary washing/rinsing, of course) and taken out to the various recycling boxes, for sorting once a day, at the end of the day.

We have a full-size grey wheelie bin for general landfill stuff that gets emptied once a fortnight, alternating with recycling collections. We have a full-size brown wheelie bin for garden waste, a blue box for paper (including junk mail, catalogues and phone directories), a blue box for cans, a blue box for cardboard and plastic bottles and a blue box for glass.

The recycling collections occur on the alternate weeks to the grey landfill bin, but is it really any "greener"? On recycle weeks the council send round a lorry for the brown wheelie bin, a seperate lorry for the paper and cans, and a third lorry for the glass and cardboard/plastic. Even stranger is that bottle banks are seperated into green, brown and clear glass but the glass recycling lorry gets all colours shoved into the same hopper - how does that work?

Puzzled of Preston

[Keith]

In message , Stuart Noble writes

Tell that to Stirling District Council, their recycling policy consists of 'curver' type boxes left out by householders with all their recyclables mixed together. Along comes a trailer with 8 small skips, and the operatives separate the contents into the skips, one bin at a time, which takes forever. An absolute nightmare if you're stuck behind them in the narrow streets, and you frequently see the trailer passing half a street of full bins because their skips are full and they have to drive miles to the base to empty them.

[Chris Hodges]

It's called a lot of cheap labour, if it's the same as Greenwich. There's some automation but not much.