Today around my way it is the dustcart day.
Black sacks for general waste Pink sacks for "recycle" waste
The pavements seem to have mountains of pink sacks put out for collection. My estimate is 10x what is normally put out for collection. It does seem to indicate how much unnecessary packaging that we still have on what we purchase.
Blue bin collection + food waste here: food waste collected to be turned into compost. Blue bin contains paper/cardboard in one section, glass, plastic, tins, metal in the main body of the bin.
"Christmas by Amazon."
If you want stuff to make it all the way from China to UK, and then by parcel post within the UK as individual items, without breaking, it needs to be packed.
The days of Mr Shopkeeper wrapping something in brown paper for you to take it home are long gone.
Owain
That did get me thinking. Despite the claims that the EU governed our every move, no two councils have the same recycling. And it is very confusing.
It surely isn't beyond man's abilities to make sensible re-cycling arrangements? That are universal?
Mate tells me not to crush drinks cans. He was told the machines don't then recognise them and sent them for landfill. Does that apply to dented ones too?
I'd have thought drinks cans would be sorted magnetically (steel) or by eddy currents (aluminium) ... I have heard the rumour about not crushing PET bottles as it stops image recognition, but if the council want that obeying they should mention in in the bumf they send every few months
Living in a country area that's near some urban scumbag areas, our lanes are chocker with flytipping.
Bill
UK seems to lead the world in having crazy local bin colours and essentially random rules as to what can and cannot be recycled.
Rural waste bins were often green (ours by happenstance are black). That meant recycling bins are blue (ie not green or black) but due to a design error ours have concave lids that collect water that gets dumped in on the contents (ruining the waste paper and cardboard inside).
Glass specifically goes into a plastic crate to avoid contaminating the paper waste with broken glass.
Our green waste is in a green bin (since we have black waste waste) those who already have green waste bins have brown green waste bins.
Weirdest green waste bins I ever saw were in Salford "shocking pink"!
That shouldn't be true in most big recycling systems. The one they have a big problem with is black supermarket cook chill plastic trays which are unclassifiable by the present sorting technology.
I have a sneaky feeling that all of our combustible "recycling" quietly finds its way to the Allertonshire incinerator anyway. The bottom has dropped out of the waste market somewhat.
+1. Although I am generally fairly in favour of devolution, this is one case where surely some centralised policy would lead to economies of scale. IIRC Wales is rather more consistent.
Also, there's never any guidance on what the householder could easily do to improve the process. Should the thin sleeves on milk bottles be removed? Should coloured lids be left on? Where do Pringles tubes go, with metal or with cardboard?
That sounds like bollox. The machines don't separate cans by visual inspection. Magnets are used for steel cans and eddy current machines separate aluminium.
Consider what happens when your recycled waste is collected from the curb side. It usually goes into a garbage collection vehicle which compacts all the waste with a large hydrolytic ram.
Ali cans get crushed, kept and weighed in. Clean Ali foil likewise.
Steel cans also get crushed but go out for the recyling collection.
Doesn't appear so.
No, put them with the plastic, but OFF the bottle.
The lid has a recycling mark, so it can go with the plastic. You'd need to enquire of your council (see their website, typically) about the tube, depends whether and what sort of composite paper/plastic they can handle. We seem to be able to recycle tetrapaks (OJ and similar) but I've seen no guidance about pringles tubes so they go in the landfill bin here.
We also have a green bin for garden waste, but that is now chargeable as of this year. And I may say that I have no problem with that, as probably most people don't generate garden waste. We grow a lot of veg so there's quite a bit, even with a lot of composting done here.
As far as I know, Dave is right about this one. We're told not to crush plastic drinks bottles either.
I've been waiting nearly a month now for an extra paid for green garden waste bin to be emptied. Why does all this normally reliable stuff tend to bog wrong on or close to Christmas every single year? Is this a law of some kind at work? Brian
I was at a major talk on the recycling economy hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry in Burlington House last year and they had a guy whose kit for recycling milk bottles was then state of the art.
The ones I can recall are that bottles should have their caps removed.
It helps if the thin nasty label sleeve is taken off too. Shredding and air blast sorting can separate most of the wheat from the chaff but it isn't perfect so a few bits of the wrong material get into each batch.
The real bete noir are certain types of laminated plastic bottles (oxygen barrier types) which are a hybrid of two plastics and can degrade an entire batch. Not all sorting machines can recognise them.
Milk bottle caps have been deliberately been made paler so that any bits that end up in the recycled crumb don't tint the melt towards green. Apparently nothing puts people off buying milk so much as pale green!
Around here, over winter the garden waste bins are emptied monthly rather than fortnightly ...
whereas ours is fortnightly, but misses one in the Christmas period.
Have you been on to the council about it?
Our council stopped the paid for green garden waste collections mid- December, and announced they would not restart for some time. This happens every year.
Not heard that. I shall continue to crush, or the bin will fill up prematurely.
Humph. Next time I see her, if I remember, I'll ask the former councillor who set up your and my council's recycling scheme. I've not looked, but it may the a detail too far for the council website.
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