Sorting the recycling!

We have a bin for landfill, a blue box for paper and card and a blue bin for glass, recycleable plastic and cans. I heard somewhere that the prices for recycled paper and certain other materials had gone through the floor and that it wasn't worth councils sorting and selling them on. If this is true, and I don't know if it is, then it makes a bit of a nonsense of the whole thing. I hate washing out cans and jars - I think it is a waste of water, but I do it anyway if they are going in the recycling (I was very good this morning). If I really haven't got the time, or I just don't feel like it, I put them in with the ordinary rubbish. Until recently, we had a green bin for garden waste, but this year the council have said that, for financial reasons, they will no longer collect the green waste. If you want it removed, you have to take it to the recycling site, or pay for it to be collected. I can see this resulting in people fly tipping their garden waste on any piece of woodland or waste ground (after all, it's all green isn't it???), spreading weeds and disease to otherwise healthy wild plants. What really gets my back up is the number of plastic items that you are not allowed to put into the recycling, so they go into landfill anyway.

I always wash the recycling. [halo]. I'm afraid it might pong otherwise!

You get used to these things.

Same here, jingl

I wash it, I sort it, I save it up in the shed. When I have loads I put it in the car, then drive to the immaculate re-cycling centre, take it out of the car and a nice young man comes and helps me put it all in the right containers. Job done.

Yes, Butter but what happens next? Do they send it to another country and shove it in the landfill (which has been reported before)?

We used to have different bags for paper and card and a box for cans and bottles, then they gave us a bin for everything to go in!

I just can't see it being economically viable to sort all that out.

Butter is your centre for collection or for sorting? Do they do a better job in France?

We have a landfill wheelie bin, collected fortnightly, and a recycling bin collected on alternate weeks. I always wash tins, bottles, cans etc although I don't wash them as I use them but leave them until the next washing up bowlful and do them at the end. They usually sit on the left of the sink along with my husband's dirty pots!!!

It is not unknown for me to take recycling out of the various waste bins around the house and but it in the correct place! [halo too please]

We pay a small amount (approx £30 pa) to get the gardening bin emptied once a fortnight.

I would be happy to pay £30 p.a. to get my garden waste collected. We are still waiting to see what our council's new collection charges will be. I have always had a composter, but have no room for two and there is a limit, at the height of the gardening season, how much you can put in it, along with all the kitchen peelings and veg waste.

Our green waste collection is free, fortnightly and my green bin needs to be filled with prunings - pronto! As nanachrissy says, all our recyclables go into the same bin here - as they do where DS2 lives in South Oxfordshire. The council sent out a leaflet explaining the new system. It all goes to a big new recycling plant at Shotton beyond Chester where there's a highly automated waste separation system. I saw an early example of one of these about 13 years ago and was impressed with its potential.

We can't put food waste in our garden bin and have no facilities to deal with that. Our garden is not big enough to compost our own stuff but what the council collects it then sells back as soil improver. I think it's a good system.

Here we sort our waste quite a bit - paper in one black box and cardboard and glass in a second. Food in a brown bin - small for in the house with supplied biodegradeable lining bags and a larger one to put to filled bags in and leave for collection. Then we have a large bag made from plasticised woven fabric - a bit like builders merchants deliver sand in - for plastic pots, bottles, tins etc. There is a request to remove tops from bottles and squash if possible - the lady from the recycling scheme said that if the tops are on when the stuff is squashed into big blocks the bottles expode if the lids are on. These containers are collected weekly and the refuse lorry is compartmentalised so that the waste is sorted at the kerb. Shredded paper and textiles we put into a bag which we label.
Our landfill sack is collected fortnightly with a different lorry. We bought a Keter garden store thing to keep the containers in and they are tidy and dry and any smell also is contained - I do rinse out pots tins bottles etc.
In France we have a yellow bag for all recycling and then just the blag bags - as we are in the country I would think most people have a large compost container. Here in UK for any garden waste which will not fit in the compost thing we use a couple of IKEA blue bags and tip them into the green waste bin at the local 'civic amenity' site - that is kept clean too.

nanaC - I take my stuff to a recycling centre which collects and sorts. I think France is pretty hot on recycling paper and glass, but not so good on plastics and the rest. They do provide for what is euphemistically called a '3rd party' - goodness knows where/what that might be. Some waste goes to providing nuclear energy, but v. little, and not from the household sort of course.

I know I was surprised and impressed at the organisation of the whole recycling system here when I first moved out, but since then the UK seems to have got their act together - (or have they)?

I believe an awful lot of nasty stuff goes into the ocean floor.

Not even just the floor, apparently there are places where the currents collect many square miles of floating plastic debris.

Here is one.
www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/the-worlds-rubbish-dump-a-tip-that-stretches-from-hawaii-to-japan-778016.html

We have one box for recycling a bin for food waste, abin for not listed before, oh, green bags for garden!
The trouble with the recycling is that the collection men refuse to take black plastic, amongst which they count black (recyclable) harpic bottles! we do not get charged, yet, for any!

We have :-
1) a brown bin for garden waste, emptied once a fortnight,
2) a green one for landfill, emptied once a week,
3) a red box for cardboard, emptied once a fortnight,
4) a blue box for tins and bottles, emptied alternate weeks to the red bin,
5) a blue sack for waste paper, emptied at the same time as the blue box, and
6) a smaller brown bin for food waste, emptied once a week, with
7) a tiny one to collect food waste indoors and transfer it to the other one.

All this is marked in the diary, otherwise there would be chaos (well, even more chaos) Oh, and plastic milk containers are taken at the same time as one of the boxes (can't remember which without the diary - I think it is the red one)

Recyclable (washed) plastic containers go into a black binbag , envelopes into another and we take them to the "packaging" container at the waste centre when the bags are full. Spent batteries go into another container there.

And who has got it wrong. And how often. And had to take it out and put it in the right one.

So in general it would seem that stuff is sorted and then put in land fill recycled! Thanks Annobel I didn't know it went to Shotton.

That's what the info leaflet said anyway. They also had a roadshow shortly after the introduction of the silver bins which I went to and had a chat with some of the Council officers. I used to have responsibility for refuse and recycling when I was a Councillor in a neighbouring authority.

Our recycling all goes in one large bin which is collected fortnightly. It goes to a sorting depot at Ford in Sussex. Ford is one of the countries largest open prisons and I believe that the stuff is sorted by the prisoners.
I always wash out the bottles, can and jars thinking, like jingle that the bin will will smell nasty otherwise and the poor bin men have a rotten job anyway without me making it worse.

A meter stack of A4 paper requires one adult tree

Every council seems to do something different which makes it very awkward when visiting another area in a self catering cottage or whatever. Why it couldn't have been organised as a national scheme I don't know.
We have a black bin for non recyclable rubbish which is collected fortnightly and in the alternate weeks we have a blue lidded bin for recyclables plastics, wrappings etc. This bin also has an insert to take newspapers, envelopes and junk mail - however, it doesn't take many because of the awkward shape and the papers have to be folded. Also collected fortnightly is a brown bin which takes cardboard, cuttings and food. It's a deep bin and boy does it smell in the summer. We are having a hosepipe ban so we won't even be able to clean it out easily. We have to keep it in the front of the house because it's not easy to take it round the back and it's in full sun. Yuk.

On your head be it if you put the wrong thing in the wrong bin apparently but at least they've got over the silliness about not accepting bins that aren't closed properly. I read that that Vince Cable [?] is trying to encourage a weekly food collection. I'm all for that health wise but our council certainly isn't. The mess that is left behind on collection day makes you wonder why we bother! It's worse when it's windy. I do rinse out items and tear off sellotape from cardboard boxes [otherwise they're not accepted] and I feel I'm doing their job for them sometimes. Refuse collection is NOT free - it is part of our council tax.

I have the usual wheely bins for landfill, recycling, food and garden waste. To make life easier I sort my rubbish in the kitchen as I go along by using a set of plastic drawers which came from Homebase. It is second nature to rinse items at the end of the washing up then chuck into the appropriate drawer.Landfill one is lined with a biodegradable bag, so transferring to outside bins is simple.

We have a green bin for ordinary rubbish, emptied fortnightly, and a blue bin for recyclable waste, empied on the weeks in between. Until recently, we weren`t able to put glass in the blue bin, but now we can. Plastic bags aren`t allowed in there, including carrier bags. I once made the mistake of putting polystyrene packaging into the blue bin, and they left the full bin where it was, as it`s not allowed in there.

I do think the most successful recycling systems are the simplest ones. Our council has one of the highest recycling rates in the country and they do it with just three bins, landfill, recycling and food waste, and a fourth for garden rubbish if you pay. I agree that a countrywide standard would help. We recently spent a lot of time living with our DD after an illness and I was always putting the wrong items in the recycling bins. Similarly when DD and DS stay with us I am always pulling items for recycling out of the landfill bin.

We have a house in France and there we are expected to take our recycling to the village recycling point where large bins are set in the ground, a bit like petrol tanks and have shutes down to them (not so noisy) and take paper and card, glass and food containers respectively. We have to put landfill out for collection in special transparent bags issued (free) by the Mairie so that they can see if we are trying to dispose of recyclables with the landfill, in which case the bag is left behind, likewise any rubbish not in the official bags. Nor can we dispose of normal household waste at the tip. We are frequent visitors to the tip as we have a big DIY project on and if we arrive with black bin sacks they will always check that it only contains building waste and not household waste.

I may be in the same county as you FlicketyB. My pet bugbear is that we also save cardboard and have to take it to the tip to be recycled. There has been a pilot recently to see if it's worth recycling it at the roadside, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to do that soon.