Nothing so simple as recycling, composting and the like?
Well it depends where you live. And not only which county you live in, but which part of the county you live in. For example in Oxfordshire you have a choice of the following:
- Cherwell District Council –
- Oxford City Council –
- South Oxfordshire District Council –
- Vale of White Horse District Council –
- West Oxfordshire District Council –
and each has its own policy.
We fall into the remit of ‘Cherwell District Council.’
And in Cherwell District Council you have a ‘Blue Bin’ collection (either a box or a wheelie bin) which takes paper, card, plastics, etc…. but NO GLASS and a ‘Brown Bin’ collection (another wheelie bin for garden waste only, until recently, but now includes kitchen waste) and these two bins are emptied in the same week, fortnightly.
And on the alternate weeks, between ‘Blue’ and ‘Brown’ collections we have a ‘Green Bin,’ which is in fact the least green of them all. This is all the ‘other’ waste – the stuff that can’t go in either re-cycling bin. EXCEPT GLASS.
In all fairness our attempts at recycling have improved.
Our ‘Green Bin,’ the contents of which ends up in landfill, is now the least full of all the bins. It contains things like the used cling film, and other thin plastics, Hoover bags, and their contents, pill containers, polystyrene (which apparently can’t be recycled) and ‘other stuff’.
To complicate matters we also have a garden compost bin in the (f)utility: for peelings and tea bags and other kitchen matter that can be composted down to feed my veg patch.
So NO COOKED FOOD in that one.
Except that certain members of the household can’t seem to separate the cooked from the uncooked and one member in particular disputes the ‘fact’ that cooked food should attract more vermin that uncooked, so there is an under current of mutiny and a need to sometimes shuffle the contents from one receptacle to another. This can cause friction.
Moving on from the friction there is still another category of waste that is not dealt with by the garden compost or the three bind which are collected in their allocated rota.
GLASS.
To recycle glass you have to collect it separately and every now and then take it in the car to a glass recycling centre, either at the supermarket or at the car park attached to the local library. And it depends where you take it whether you have to colour code your glass into green, brown and clear -(And what are you supposed to do with the BLUE ones?) – and this is a job I REFUSE TO DO if there is any risk at all of WASPS.
So there you have it. A simple guide to recycling. Not.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Pseu! I feel for you! I cannot work out why one state here has decided that some materials are recyclable and others are not. At least here there are just two bins and one only has to make the decision as to which one to use…
To my mind it is becoming utterly ridiculous. As for bottles, why do they not reinstate the ‘deposit’ system? But, not like they do in South Australia where every bottle and can has a ‘refundable’ deposit which can be redeemed at the Waste Station.
We¹ recycle absolutely nothing here!
Our refuse is all dumped in large black plastic bags which once a week we place on our verge and is collected, my day is a Wednesday, the binmen have usually collected and cleared our suburb prior to 8am.
¹I mean as in a by-law, we do recycle cardboard and newspapers which we seem to accumulate a lot of but that’s voluntary!
Ah, well, I have been tempted to address this very subject but it is very complicated and I have had just about enough of this stupidity.
So, we are South Oxfordshire and we CAN recycle any sort of glass in the same bin as paper and so forth. Now I have no idea if you have the same system but we have to recycle food. We have two bins; one for the house and one outside which is sort of much smaller than the black bin for landfill and the green bit for recycling and the brown bin for garden rubbish.
I have frankly had enough of this nonsense, and no one knows what exactly to put in which bin. We abandoned the garden composting because it was attracting rats.
I’m quite keen to minimise land-fill but this is absurd.
Soutie.
I wish we could go back to your system. This is so time consuming, utterly stupid and expensive, because we all get it wrong, I think it is a monumental waste of time.
By the time you’re finished acquiring bins for this and bins for that – there’ll be no garden left!
I don’t know about anyone else, but the majority of rubbish in this house is unnecessary packaging. Smiths have just started putting their crisps in good sturdy cardboard boxes – I’m sure they protect the crisps, but it’s just another bit of junk to throw away. Apparently Germany made it the responsibility of retailers to dispose of such stuff, and after great numbers of customers unpackaged all their goods at the check-out the retailers prevailed upon suppliers to reduce their packaging…
We are not supposed to put electrical goods in the rubbish, that includes batteries – so while we are ‘saving the planet’ by storing up those items we are using our cars to take them elsewhere. At least the Waste Stations in this bit of Queensland are free – in all the other States we have lived in one had to pay to dump rubbish – and, of course, lots of people didn’t…
Shortly after I got my HGV1 licence about a year after retirement, my agency gave me a job driving the bin lorry for a day. Mrs Jazz was appalled, but I assured her that I probably wouldn’t be driving the thing round where we live; and so it turned out to be. I can’t remember now where we went , it was all a sort of a blur. Nine hours solid driving; backing and filling this bloody truck into all sorts of places where its should never be. Fortunately the binmen knew the round otherwise we’d been in the dwang rather than collecting it.
The bin lorry holds about 12 tons of waste and when it’s full up you have to take it to the landfill site. In our case that was Didcot. You drive through the weighbridge and they give you a ticket for the load and then onto the dumping area which I can only describe as a mountain of crap, like scene from hell with seagulls scavenging overhead and enormous bulldozers with pronged wheels driving all over it. It was pretty steep and we had to get to the top before dumping the load. No finesse, you just point the truck at the hill and floor the throttle (automatic gearbox). The vehicle grinds and slithers to the top somehow.
You dismount making sure you’re wearing a hard hat (in case one of the gulls shits on you?) and high vis vest (in case one of the bulldozers runs you over ?). You then fiddle with a couple of controls at the rear if the vehicle and raise the visor which allows the blade to extrude all the crap. While this is happening you’ve got back in a drive the vehicle slowly ahead leaving the rubbish astern.
I think I did this job about four times, not consecutively. Quite enjoyed it in a masochistic sort of way.
The ultimate irony is that the original dustbins and rectangular green recycling bins, which are now redundant are the “wrong” sort of plastic and cannot be recycled!
They will take them away because they won’t fit into the landfill wheelie bin, so what the heck are we supposed to do with them?
oops, they will not take them away and etc.
Park them outside the Council Offices….
Make holes in the bottom and use them as compost bins?
I feel sorry for the people that live in towns and have no facilities to store these wretched bins, it is all very well in the country and OK in flats which generally have a service area somewhere as we did at the flat in Brum, but what about terrace houses?
Here we have 4 bins for tins, paper, glass and plastic respectively plus a waste bin for everything else. Metal can be left next to the bin and they will take it away. They have moratoriums every now and then fro waste oil batteries etc at the dump and take them in free.
The good thing is that one gets a discount on your garbage bill if you recycle, you don’t have to but a few dollars off a month gets most to do it. Garbage is not free about $20.00 per month from a private contractor on behalf of the council. You can choose weekly or fortnightly service, we have fortnightly, only being two of us we don’t need it more often. It is rarely included in the rates in the USA, just a few major cities offer it as part of the deal.
Ara, can’t make out what is the difference between the two food types?
It would not work here with food mucking about, bears! A lot of places one has to have bearproof bins, all double flapped to stop their raids.
Of course cooked food should not be composted in a garden it will only work in a hot compost industrial process, small vermin are the least of the problems, foxes, stoats, badgers and even worse disease! Even raw stuff attracts a few creatures, I put scrubby apples in the compost and squash that are melting, a certain amount always disappears!
Christina, in Hove where there are lots of flats, the Council has put large, and extremely ugly bins on the pavements. They will not collect from the flats any more. My mother’s friend, aged 96, has to carry all his rubbish along the street to one of these bins.
“Most composting systems don’t allow you to compost cooked food and meat products. However, the Swedish JK125 and JK270 domestic composters from SmartSoil Ltd will enable you turn ALL your kitchen waste into a nutritious soil-improving compost in just a few weeks. Details can be found on SmartSoil’s website where you can also find details of a fully automated community composter that will take up to 50 kg of catering waste per day.”
http://www.recycling-guide.org.uk/composting.html
Here’s our street this morning.
An advanced guard walks the streets placing the bags on one side of the road, this obviously expediates the ‘pick up.’
When I say we put everything in them I mean everything, batteries, glass (which we wrap in newspaper or cardboard to prevent injuries), bottles, tins you name it.
We don’t tie the bags too tight either, there are always groups of poor and destitute people who precede the collection and rummage through them for anything of value! One mans rubbish…
“One mans rubbish…”
Where there is muck there is brass!
I do think recycling is important and we must do it, but it has been bought in in such a haphazard way that not even one county can’t coordinate its efforts!
Pseu.
From what I have seen of recycling in the UK it is not only haphazard, but also extremely hard for people to do. The more difficult one makes it for the individual the less they will co-operate. Here, all our recycling goes in one bin – presumably it is sorted at the ‘other end’. Paper, tins, bottles, and plastic are, basically, ‘clean’ and there really is no need for the ‘consumer’ to do the work of separating it out. OK, it probably costs more to do it that way – but because it is easy, people do it. We do not have ‘officials’ snooping in our bins to ensure that we do.
But recycling is only a small part of the problem of conserving resources. Excessive packaging that has to be dumped or recycled is, in my view, something else that needs to be tackled. At the moment, our garage is full of cardboard boxes and packaging that we will have to take to the tip. I’m not adverse to any of it – I’d be annoyed if the new TV, and other electronic equipment we’ve recently bought had not been packaged properly to ensure its safe delivery. But, do I really need ten packets of crisps packed in a cardboard box? I don’t think so – in fact I’ve stopped buying that brand for that reason. It’s about time the recycling bods started putting pressure on suppliers to cut back on the wasteful use of resources for packaging.
‘Wasteful retailing’ is an area I’d like to see tackled. I remember when if I wanted half a dozen masonry nails I could buy them – now I have to buy a packet with two or three times the number I require. The rest just sit in the cupboard.
There is a call here, as I believe there is in the UK, for people not to be wasteful with food. Yet, there are times when I cannot buy just one large mushroom, sufficient mixed salad for two of us, etc, etc… If I want mushrooms or salad – or indeed many other things – I have to buy sufficient quantities to feed an ‘average’ family – so I have to eat it until I’m bored stiff with it, throw half of it away – or I have to go without.
If recycling is meant to reduce waste, then let’s have an overall programme whereby manufacturers are part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
I agree, Boa!
Our blue bins do actually take an admixture of products that are then sorted at the other end, which is good, and does simplify the system…but they won’t take glass.
We also have a number of coloured bins for differing things, (what if you’re colour blind?) but even so a lot of the stuff goes to landfill anyway.
As for driving to a bottle bank or the tip how the hell is that green, rather than one lorry collecting the stuff you have a few hundred cars queuing up for an hour to recycle bottles to save the environment? an hour is the average time at our tip if you can get near it, unless you go midweek which I can’t as I work.