Sorting the recycling!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Same here, jingl

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

You get used to these things.

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.