Sorting the recycling!

Since we moved down to Devon in October, it has taken me until now to sort out the recycling, which is completely different from Medway! I watched the recycling people look at my plastics box, and walk away from it. Then I put the wrong things (which had been the right things before), into the bottles bin. And so on. At Christams, Theseua went to the tip with some black bags (into which you put everything about which you can't make a decision) and the tip police examined a bag and gave it back because it had some orange peel in it. (HE eats the oranges!)

Think I have it right now...off to the hospital to see how the orange peel offender is doing!

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There has been a lot of debate about incineration. gg. The main bone of contention was what to do with the ash which contained toxic dioxins. I know that local incinerators fuel some communities' power and heating systems in - I think - Denmark, but don't know how they have solved the problem of the ash.

I use the clear bio degradeable bags for food waste. I prefer the brown paper, but I can't get them any more

We are only allowed to use black plastic sacks in the non recycling bin. Everything else is expected to be loose although the Council 'allows' brown bags - compostable for food waste NOT recyclable plastic caddy bags. It drives me nuts when I go away and have to rethink everything. I do wonder sometimes if it's worth it. Burn the lot??????

grannyactivist. I live in Oxfordshire, Vale of White Horse. Compared with systems in other places where family and friends live, our system really is easy-peasy.

We are lucky here in that everything gets collected on the same day, every week and goes to the MK recycling plant.
In my MILs there are different intervals and different days of the week for different coloured bins!
Blue box for glass
We have pink bags for recyclables
Green bin for food and green waste
Black bag for landfill
our black bag does not get a lot of stuff in it.
Food waste is a few chicken bones or a bit of fish skin.
I have a compost bin and use those decomposable "plastic' bags to collect it in.
My BIL is in the recycling business and he says it is not worth washing. But he keeps his in the garage. I rinse if likely to smell in the kitchen. e.g. a milk carton

In South Australia since 1977 we have had a deposit on cans, bottles and drink cartons, which is returned when the container is taken to a recycling place. The rest of Australia has lagged behind and are still talking about it even though they know it works. Really how hard is it to pay an extra 10 cents (about 5p) and 20 cents on large bottles. Think of all the glass and aluminium cans that have been recycled in South Australia over the last thirty years odd years that have not ended up in landfill. You won't ever see an empty can or carton laying on the roadside.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.