Recycling

[Tim Watts]

On Friday 23 August 2013 21:43 dennis@home wrote in uk.d-i-y:

I hope you are driving your own rubbish to the landfill and not expecting others to subsidise your idleness.

[dennis]

Expanded polystyrene isn't easy to auto separate after its crumbled, which is does as soon as its put in the bin. It clings to everything as you may have noticed.

[polygonum]

Our rules currently state that we are allowed to dispose of plastic bottles - but not most other plastic items such as pots, trays, and so on.

I keep wondering how a bottle is defined? I could understand if they said something like typical PET fizzy drink bottles - but the range between them and the other bottle-like containers is vast and poorly defined. And how come they make no specification whatsoever about which plastic the bottle is made from?

[The Other Mike]

The idea of sorting it all out and then having the council ship it off to a landfill dump in a third world country is also antisocial.

Apologies for the source (and DEFRA apparently deny what the DM are claiming) but similar stories have been covered by a few other news outlets over recent years.

[The Other Mike]

No bin in the kitchen, no sorting, no composting anything once it has come into the house, just a carrier bag, tied up and dumped in the dustbin that takes maybe six weeks to fill. Aluminium cans get crushed flat and dumped in a bucket, when its full it gets weighed in. Can't be arsed to recycle anything else but plastic bottles, that bin gets emptied once a year . With the majority of my waste going to landfill I feel I am doing my bit for future archaeologists.

[The Other Mike]

How do they get away with that then?

Do you have to buy your own?

[The Other Mike]

So f*ck 'em. Let it all go to landfill asthat is where it will probably end up anyway, maybe even overseas because quite a few 'recycling schemes' have bugger all traceability.

[polygonum]

I do not understand the bit you are questioning. Who is getting away with what?

Our local authority will be supplying us with both an outside brown food waste bin and a silver/grey food waste "caddy" for use within our kitchen.

[D.M.Chapman]

Following all the bad press about this, our council published some info on where their recycling goes (assuming you believe them :-)).

Batteries go to Belgium to Revatech

Food waste goes to Maidstone (so 40mins or so away)

mixed recycling goes to rainham (maybe 30-40 miles?) and is sorted and processed. Plastics turned into pellets there. Cans sent to Llanelli (bit of a trek!). Aluminium to Warrington or Redditch.

Glass heads to Dagenham or South Kirby. Card to Erith.

Garden waste goes to Capel-le-Ferne (about 2 miles away) where is it composted on a farm. This is why no food waste is allowed in there. It used to be allowed, but now any suggestion of food waste and the foot and mouth rules that came in bans it from being carried onto the farm site. (apparantly no idea how true that is). Also the reason Knotweed and Ragwort are not allowed?

Apparantly the "landfill" bin no longer goes to landfill, but is sent to be incinerated and generate power. No idea where...

Assuming this is really what happens then it's not too bad IMO.

Darren

[Terry Fields]

My LA accepts shredded paper, but won't let it be bagged-up in paper bags to go in the paper-recycling crate, it has to be tipped in as is.

Needless to say, a gentle breeze blows it all over the street. One only does this once, then bags it up and puts it in with the general waste. Clever, what?

[The Other Mike]

"Mine doesn't even provide me with a general waste bin for outside."

[polygonum]

Must say, I am surprised that ours is going to supply such a caddy. They supplied a kitchen food waste caddy several years ago and the usual way these things seem to work is that they supply one and that is your lot.

However any replacement of any of the bins, for any reason, is chargeable. So if the bin associated with the property disappeared, we too would end up without one until we pay for a replacement. Perhaps that is what happened? Or maybe it is like some properties in our area which have no bins but do get plastic bags instead?

[Huge]

It's fine if they've been boiled - you could suck them up a straw (I make stock from chicken carcasses.)

[tim.....]

well that's caused by the race to the bottom on "headline" pricing.

And companies that didn't play the game found that they lost customers as there aren't enough who are prepared to "pay" for the better service. So they all had to follow the pack

tim

[tim.....]

minimum wage jobs are better than no jobs

tim

[tim.....]

therein is the problem, for lots of people

tim

[tim.....]

and where do you keep all this rubbish while you are waiting to accumulate a full load

Not everyone has a garage

tim

[tim.....]

AIH in my new house where I have been for 3 weeks I have passed by the council tip twice (well passed by the end of the road where there's a sign saying "tip this way", I have no idea how far down the road it is).

At the previous place where I lived 2.5 years...

no, never once did I have cause to go to (or even near) the estate where the tip was located.

tim

[tim.....]

a windfall apple is garden waste and may go in you garden waste bin

a bought apple gone rotten because you stupidly didn't eat it in time is domestic refuse and may not go in your garden waste bin.

Though I'm not sure why councils have a problem with this as nowadays most council charge extra for garden waste collection (if yours doesn't it will soon) and domestic waste collection is free

tim

[Scott M]

Round here they take the food waste away and cook it up to 60C to sterilise it. A more anti-green green measure I've yet to imagine[1].

[1] Unless, say, someone were to come up with a way of generating electricity that consumed more energy in building the generator that it would ever create.