Be Excellent To Each Other

I would vote Green, but my annoyance with being forced to split my household rubbish into two separate bins - only one of which is outside my house - for recycling purposes means that I'd be a complete hypocrite.

I say two separate bins, but I've only got one bin, so I mean "one bin and some piles around my house".

Buy another bin then.

*tuts at those too lazy to stop destroying the planet*

Hang on, they offer to collect your recycling for you, and you're moaning about it?

Bins are made from plastic and oil, man.

I'll (not surprisingly) be voting for my tory chums, cos, you know, it'll be nice to be on the winning side..

I probably will next time I'm somewhere that sells them, but god knows when that'll be. You can't buy bins anywhere I normally go to and I'm not driving fifteen miles just to buy a bin. And my house is tiny and completely full, so I've no idea where a second bin would go anyway - my wife got some new saucepans for her birthday and they're sitting in the boot of the car because we haven't worked out where they can possibly go in out house, yet. Yes, it's that small and full.

And now only the recycling bin's outside our house. so when I want to empty other rubbish - which makes up about 80% of the stuff we throw away, of course - I now have to walk to the black bins at the bottom of the road with splitting, stinking, leaking bags of rubbish every time I want to throw it out. And they only take that away every two weeks. And we only have three - THREE - wheelie bins for about sixteen houses. Which, as I said, are only emptied every two weeks.

And we're not talking about saving the planet, anyway. The planet will be fine, we're just talking about maintaining the planet's current ecology.

Paper, hard plastic and metal. I'm not moaning about that, so much as the fact they've decided not to bother doing to rest of the rubbish any more. If they gave us the extra bins and kept up the other services I wouldn't mind, but it's the whole "we'll collect 20% of the rubbish like we always did, but fuck the other 80% - you know, the smelly stuff that you can't keep in the house or car" that I object to.

Throw the rubbish out more often and solve both problems!

But that means walking ALL THE WAY DOWN THE ROAD and I AM VERY, VERY LAZY.

Hmm. Make Mrs Owen do it.

Our council gave us 2 bins and 2 tubs..

Black - Household none recyclable.
Green - Garden, shreded paper and carboard.
Blue Tub - Non Shreaded paper
Black Tub - Bottles, Cans, areosols, tinfiol

The only thing not collected is plastic, so it is a run to the tip every so often when my plastic tup..


I must build storage for these bloody tubs..

Where do you put the spoilt ballots?

It's funny how politics always comes down to bins and parking, isn't it

About the rubbish, what I find is that if you separate all the separatable stuff (glass bottles, metal cans, paper, compostables) from the rest, there is honestly almost nothing left, plastic wrappers, probably a carrier-bag full a week including the bin from the bathroom.

At least 90% recycling by weight anyway.

I guess that's the idea anyway, you should need to put far less in the landfill bins.

I can see a problem if you use a lot of disposeable nappies mind you

We use a mixture of re-useable nappies and eco disposables..

Did not have a choice as the little bugger has grown very quickly..

We have:

Green bin - Paper, cardboard, metal, plastic. (One per two houses, kept next to houses. Emptied every week.)
Black bin - Everything else. (Three per sixteen houses, kept together at end of road. Emptied every two weeks.)

Does that not seem the wrong way round to anyone?

Very much so. I take it the black bins are overflowing after day 1?

Don't get me wrong, I can see the point, but forcing people to recycle in this manner is a crap way of doing it. What's the point of saving the planet if it stinks of shit?

Green bin - household waste
Brown bin - garden waste
Blue bin/boxes - card, plastic, tin cans

Dunno yet, this only happened the beginning of this week and I took the rubbish out yesterday. One bin was full, the next I tried was half-empty. They came this morning, but I don't know if it was a recycling week or a recycling + rubbish week.

In Oxford the two boxes were dark blue and dark green. Late at night, it was nigh-on impossible to tell which was which without the lights on.

Now I've moved we have a green box for everything except cardboard. But it's a weekly collection for waste and recyling, which is good.

No, see above. I'd be much happier with that, since it's closer to how much we need.

Currently I take 2 plastic boxes of recycling to the place every week myself (bottles and cans mostly, and tetrapacks), and the wheelie bin on the doorstep, which gets emptied by a giant truck once every two weeks only ever has a few inches of plastic wrappers at the bottom it.
Complete waste of time, I may as well take that stuff too since I was going there anyway. I wonder if I can ask to do that and get a rebate on my council tax..

Compostables (buy which I guess you mean food) and glass go in the regular rubbish, along with soft plastics, like food wrappers. We don't have a lot of glass - virtually none, in fact - but the other two make up bulk of our rubbish.

I put all my rubbish in a black bin bag that is collected every Tuesday morning.

That includes cans, cardboard, food waste, the lot! Ha!!

This, our house hold has gone up with a baby, as every thing is plastic wrapped and the odd nappy..

That's what I used to do until a few weeks ago. It was lovely.

Then we had to separate out recycling rubbish from other rubbish into two bins that sat outside my house.

And this week they said that was a mistake and took most of the non-recycling bins away and moved the few that remained down the road.

*sobs* stop talking about your bins please

I think I would prefer that, as the bins and tubs take up a lot of room.

I am not middle class, I was born in Burnley

Glass goes in the landfill? FFS that's almost criminal
Yes, I meant food. I guess I'm lucky that I have space for a compost bin. Not everyone does. But any sort of green leaning council would provide facilities for that, which means you no longer have smelly rubbish to deal with, and a far smaller volume of it. Everyone's a winner, I'd have thought.

My council estate has four massive bins for recycling and four massive bins for rubbish. Each gets emptied once a week (I think), and the recycling is at the wrong end of the bleeding estate.

That said, the recycling bins get filled to overflowing a lot more often than the regular bin ones.

Actually, come to think of it, there might be more large rubbish bins at the other end of the estate. Yeah, there probably is.

Anyway, we don't do compostables, and that can be quite a bit, especially if you like to roast a chicken now and again. Get it sorted, Lewisham council!

Yup Bridgnorth Council gave us a free compost bin. It is next to our raised bed.

I though every one recycled now

Uhhh - you really, REALLY, don't want to compost meat. Really.

I do.

Om nom nom.

My council come every week to collect rubbish, but it alternates between household waste one week and then recyclable materials the next.

I cannot fathom this, as surely almost every household produces far more non-recyclable waste than recyclable? Why not do a household waste collection every week and then a recyclable collection every two weeks, perhaps parallel with the normal one?

The collection team didn't even take my bin for emptying this week so I've now got to get through two weeks with a full bin, and nowhere to put any waste we generate in the next two weeks.

People keep saying that but I can only assume you're doing it wrong.

Anyway, enough of this rubbish.

Thanks for that link Dimmers. Much sense talked.

So, what does everyone put down their drains? I mostly put water down there, but the plans to have a seperate gravy drain confuse and INFURIATE me!

POrTalooW

Depends how much is recyclable. I know both my recent households probably produce twice to three times as much recyclable as not.

Pfh, bins. Throw your bags out into the alleyway like we have to! The rats and cats leave them alone, just as you'd expect!

Our recycling takes everything except glass. What's the most stuff we have for recycling? Yes, glass.

So one of us drives up to Morrison's to put it in the bottle banks there. Saving the planet, one car trip at a time.

I know it may be considered a bit cunty, but recycle everything recyclable, regardless as to whether Lewisham council take it or not. My view is that if you dump that shit on them they have to deal with it, and if enough people do it, their easiest route will be to actually recycle the fuckers.

Prime examples are tetrapaks and yoghurt pots, which many other places take (including greenwich, next door I believe), but lewisham 'don't'.

Isn't that everything?

Fix.

Really? The literature we got says that if it's recyclable, they'll take it.

Ours won't take Tetra packs, but our re-cycle centre will, so it is a trip there every so often


Mods, is it worth breatking recyling to its own thread?

Fix

Refixed for accuracy.

I just checked.

We've produced about 3/4 of a black bag of rubbish in our first week or so and we're very near filling the 2nd huge orange bag of recyclables.

On a weekly basis we produce 1 black back of normal rubbish and two stupid box things (1.5'x1'x0.5') of recyclables.

In Hart, they consider this 'pollution', say they then trash your recycling with the normal waste, and to deal with this they are consiering implementing a three-strike system. First strike: a warning; second strike: a four-figure fine; third strike: they cease collecting from your property permanently.

Sadly, they aren't putting the same amount of energy into recycling. Rather than figuring out how to recycle soft plastics, they instead regularly leaflet us and tell us not to buy items with lots of plastic packaging. Gee, thanks.

Our collection is also a switcheroo one, with a black garbage bin one week and a blue recycling one the next. We get a green tray for glass (which the council finally caved in and started dealing with a year ago), and you can optionally buy stupidly small 'garden waste' bags that the council then don't bother collecting most of the time.

Caerphilly has started upgrading its recycling collections. Before it was a green bin (for normal waste) and a tiny, pathetic mini-tub thing the size of a desk drawer for your recycling, which had to be seperated into the various types (plastic, tin, glass, paper) in carrier bags. Fair enough.

Then they gave us the 'green waste' bags, which were large fabric sacks that you were meant to put garden clippings in. These were accompanied by a letter saying how important it was that we all use these to ensure the council meets its target to recycle x tons of green waste a year. Suffice it to say, a month ago we did some gardening, filled both bags and put them out for collection... and they vanished. Whether caught by the wind or the hands of a passing arsehole, I don't know.

Only last week, our new brown 'recycling bin' arrived. It's got detailed lists of what you can and can't put inside it (so, magazines with Lily Allen on the cover good, envelopes bad). Baffling, though, is the fact it DOESN'T take carrier bags any more. Which means you just have to dump your clattering empty sauce jars, beer bottles, cans of soup and such into it, where it can mix and ferment overnight with your cardboard and newspapers and empty plastic bottles. Either there's some SERIOUS sorting going on, or there's just a SERIOUSLY big hole they're just dumping all the stuff into as they just can't be fucked. I'm sure my neighbours love me after I emptied a week's worth of glass and tin into it last night, bounced it down the front steps and hauled it around the corner.