Do you do all you can to recycle ?

Our council is in the top six in Wales for recycling and we only get our black bin emptied once every 4 weeks but ours is rarely full and if we’re away we don’t worry about missing a collection .

We also have a skip in the village every couple of months but you do have to be there on the dot of 8am as once it’s full, it’s off!

I rarely have food waste as I eat or freeze leftovers, scrub rather than peel veggies, and have a compost heap for eggshells, teabags etc. Bacon fat and bones (boiled for stock first 😇) are the only things in the little bag which sits in the fridge until the weekly collection.

All clothes, shoes, handbags are taken to a charity shop along with other household bric a brac and old towels are cut up for Mr PG’s DIY stash.

We have four different bins for general waste, paper/cardboard, recycling including glass, and garden waste, the latter costs £50 a year. Also have our own compost bin, no food waste collections here yet.

Cannot understand people moaning on Facebook about how difficult it is to put things in the correct bin, or missing out on collection days. Just read the instructions!

Someone upthread mentioned taking yogurt pots and tetra packs to a Waitrose, they can go in our recycling one.

Our black bin contains very little, but then we don’t waste stuff or throw things out, they are car booted, sent to charity, put in the rag bin etc.

Soft plastics taken to the supermarket and recycled there.

We have two wheelie bins, one for general waste and the other for recycling paper/tins etc. They go out alternate weeks. Then a box for glass which goes out recycling week. A food caddy which gets emptied weekly (not usually much in mine). We could have a garden waste one for around £55 a year but we compost or take stuff to the tip where they have an area set aside for it. Often my general waste bin just has one or two small bags in so could easily go monthly.

Our black bins (general rubbish, no food or recycling) are collected once a fortnight, ditto the blue - paper and card, and the smaller plastic/metal/glass bins for recycling.

The food waste bin goes weekly - everything always tied in a biodegradable bag.
Works fine here.

Garden waste bins are extra - you have to pay an annual fee.

Any scraps of meat of fish, or e.g. a chicken carcass after I’ve boiled it up for stock, go in a biodegradable bag in the freezer until the night before the bin men come.
So we’ve never had maggots.

Yes.

We do, but transport is the biggest contributor to emissions, particularly flying which many continue to do.

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We have a very slim black bin. On orange liddedbin for tin cans, cardboard, plastic, green bin for garden waste and I take all glass to the bottle bank by the village hall

We have 2 bins 1 general waste and one garden waste and boxes for plastic, glass, and paper/card.
We recycle batteries and ink cartridges at school and we also collect spectacles for a lady who goes to Africa.
Supermarkets are getting the hang of helping, but I’ve yet to see a plastic bottle recycling machine here like the one we used in France. Just feed in your pop bottles etc and you get a bonus for doing it.

I recycle everything I possibly can, and re-use too. Anything that could possibly be used as a plant pot (e.g. colanders, old plastic bowls, lightshades, waste-bins) is in the garden. I love finding alternative uses for things in my cluttered house!

A few other alternatives: Clarks take old shoes in any state; Superdrug takes pill pop-out strips; Rymans takes any bits of pens; Currys takes old electrical items; I'm sure there are many more schemes; this site is useful. www.terracycle.com/en-GB

We have four bins - general waste, recycling as in paper cardboard etc - glass bin - and a garden waste bin which we pay an annual fee for. We have a compost bin in the garden too for raw vegetable waste (but not potato peelings). We also collect the plastic wrappings that cannot be disposed of kerbside and we take those to the supermarket where they have a designated cage.
I also make my own cleaning products as I am determined to not put any nasty chemical into the ecosystem that would eventually find its way into the seas and oceans.

Yes, you have to here or cop a fine. It’s been like that for years now and that’s good. We now also have small ‘fogo ’ bins and biodegradable liners supplied by the council to put next to our kitchen sinks as well as the 3 bins for rubbish and different recycling. They won’t collect them if you put the wrong stuff in them. It started many,many years ago ( at least 35 that I can remember)

We have a black bin for landfill (collected every 2 weeks) a blue bin for paper and card (also every two alternate weeks) a green container for metal, plastic and glass, ditto, and a brown food waste bin (weekly).

We would have to pay £60 p.a. extra for a garden waste bin, but we take it to the tip.

I do try to limit the plastic, at least - we still have milk in glass from the milkman, use bar soap rather than shower gel, laundry detergent in cardboard boxes, no conditioner any more - and I won’t buy anything in plastic if there’s a glass or metal alternative.

Dh has been roundly ticked off for buying mayonnaise and golden syrup in plastic squeezy bottles. TBH I hate those anyway - so much harder to get the last dregs out. But he won’t make that mistake again!

About 50 years ago, when I first became conscious of the damage to the environment, I knew a wise couple who had lived through the depression and a world war. They produced very little waste - it fitted into a cornflake packet each week.
I often think of them.
In those days we could burn things too and that option has largely gone.
Yet it bothers me that there is so much waste - even recyclable waste. why do huge wheelie bins of all colours line our streets?

Its just too easy to dispose of things we no longer need.

Where my DB lives in Denmark each household has one bin with divisions clearly marked for the various categories,
In NZ where one of my DS lives there's the TIP SHOP.
Your car is weighed at the recycling centre and you are weighed again and charged per kilo on leaving.
There is a shop where you can buy other peoples donated furniture and toys etc. The money raised goes to charity.

I am impressed by how much we on this thread are trying to reduce our carbon footprint but we could, as a country, do much better.

Incidentally I do try to buy at least some of my food and household products from our local Refillery so packaging is minimal.
At last we all pay for plastic bags and some of these are decomposable.
I am lucky that I can compost nearly all my food waste, and let the worms and slugs turn it into lovely soil. I riddle this for potting compost too.

As for the people who still fly and drive everywhere, cruise several times a year-- that has to be another thread

Just reminded by the last couple of posts; I really recommend a Green Johanna compost bin if you have room for one. It is a hot composter and so takes all food, even cooked. I don't eat animal products, but I'm told it can even deal with those!

Really fast too at producing compost, and with my worm bin too, I don't use our food recycling bin at all.

Mollygo

We have 2 bins 1 general waste and one garden waste and boxes for plastic, glass, and paper/card.
We recycle batteries and ink cartridges at school and we also collect spectacles for a lady who goes to Africa.
Supermarkets are getting the hang of helping, but I’ve yet to see a plastic bottle recycling machine here like the one we used in France. Just feed in your pop bottles etc and you get a bonus for doing it.

The large Tesco used to have a lay-by with a selection of recycling banks, including one that paid a Clubcard point for a certain number of bottles, the machine counter them as they were deposited.

People started cutting their plastic bottles into lots of small pieces to earn a point for each piece. The facility was removed within a year.

Wow! twiglet77.
The cunning of some people.
We had to turn the bottle so the barcode showed.

I was brought up not to waste as we were a big family everything mattered so no waste. I recycle everything I possibly can in the right containers and bins allocated,
Green waste and fruit and veg trimmings are composted we don't have food waste.
It really annoys me when Council's have been outed for not recycling properly. Most people comply and spend a lot of time sorting out paper plastics etc. The Councils provide the bins so the should fulfill their duty to sort out the recycled rubbish properly.

While I am sceptical about recycling, it is just part of everyday life here in Germany. Increasingly more types of bottles are included in the deposit system and hardly anyone goes shopping without a big bag full of empty bottles., starting the trip round the supermarket with a visit to the machine which prints out a receipt for the returned bottles, which is redeemed when you pay at the till.

Bottle banks have gone and glass is collected at the kerbside. My DiL says there is still too much glass thrown away - why not return jam jars, gherkin jars etc as well for re-use?

All plastics and tins are collected in plastic sacks. Yoghurt pots etc should not be rinsed out as the extra water used rather defeats the object of helping the environment. You can put polystyrene in the plastic sacks but they should not be mixed with other materials.

Paper and cardboard are collected in a separate wheelie bin. We use newspapers in the winter for starting the fire, so reduce waste that way.

Sometimes you hear of cases where all the carefully separated rubbish is chucked into one container. Hence my scepticism.

When I think back to when I'm was a child, though, my parents practised conservation and waste reduction by having a huge compost heap, and far fewer items were sold in plastic wrappings. Of course we also had a huge bonfire every bonfire night.

When we cleared the house after our mother died, we found the dustbin that they used to use for waste that couldn't be disposed of in the home or garden. It was tiny!

However the recycling that households can do is a drop in the ocean compared to what waste industries all over the world are churning out. I despair when I see pictures of the plastic in the oceans and the mountains of discarded clothes and rubbish in Ghana.

Actually I do
Black bin (general waste) - every week
Green bin - garden and food waste - every week
Red top bin - cardboard, boxes, paper - every other week, alternating with
Blue topped bin - plastic, glass, metal.
All free (well, included in Council Tax)

Yes we do but Somerset Council is short of money and the recycling company might walk away unless paid more, a consequence of Tory underfunding of local authorities.

If you have ANYTHING that is remotely usable I'd suggest putting it on either Freecycle or Facebook Marketplace. Only last week we gave away a bit of plasterboard and a recordable box which didn't work (someone was going to use it for spares). We've given away lots of stuff over the past few years. There's always somebody that wants it. You don't have to meet them - we just put it outside our front door and tell them to help themselves.

I do try to recycle as much as we can, we have food waste, plastic and cardboard, glass and paper collected weekly, with black bin and garden waste fortnightly. Like yourself I have started collecting my " soft plastic" as I call it for recycling at our local Co-op.
Our council has just had a consultation about going monthly on the black bin and charging for green waste,I filled an online form to object about this. we will wait and see what happens. I don't mind the black bin being monthly as that is what I usually do anyway but I hope that the green waste stays free.
I once got told off by our local councillor because she had spotted that I had put a glass deodorant container in the glass recycle box but apparently I should have as it had a plastic roller on it. How you are supposed to remove it I don't know without causing yourself an injury, but I have changed my deodorant to an all plastic container. 🙄🤐

I don't think it is widely known that many Dobbies garden centres take old plant pots and compost bags for recycling - their website says which stores. The recycling point at our nearest is hidden at the back of the site but we have offloaded lots of pots there

We recycle everything we can. After all these years of having wheelie bins it becomes automatic.
Just three bins here.
A black one for general rubbish collected once every two weeks.
Green one for paper, cardboard, plastic etc and a brown one for garden waste. These two get emptied together once every two weeks.