Recycling is a load of rubbish.

[misterPK]

I agree with you. Instead of being so very forward with this recycling thing they should look at the manufacturers first and get them to reduce packaging.

For a few years now there has been a system to make manufacturers responisble for the packaging they use. They have to buy "Packaging Recovery Notes" from recyclers to account for the ammount of packaging they produce, in effect helping to pay for the waste they create. The target ammout of PRN's they have to buy is increased slightly every year to encourage them to find ways to use less.

However, there is currently an oversupply of PRN's, and as they are traded as a commodity the prices arent that high.

In Norway we got this recycling deal when it comes to plastic and glass bottles that you bring them back to a shop (they all have the machines for it) and then you get something between 10p and 25p for each bottle you recycle. They then get reused and people have an incentive to recycle them too (even if you pay the extra money when you buy the drink)

The revenue generated from collection of domestic recycling will go back to the council to help them offset other costs, so in a way this helps keep your council tax down. You may not see the money going through your hands, but it does make a difference.

I think some of you are missing the point about recycling. The two main issues are a lack of landfill space and the damage that landfill actually causes with regards to leachate and rendering large quantities of land useless.

Recycling is good, landfilling is bad. Even if there isn't an environmental gain to be made by recycling.

This is true. The government taxes waste going to landfill quite highly, and there is a ever decreasing number of sites avaliable. A number of commercial recycling processes are carried out at a loss because it still works out cheaper than sending it to landfill.

PK!

 

[Glaucus]

and it strange, that houses with few people get hit hard when they don't recycle

??

don't get hit with anything. I can chuck all my stuff in the rubbish bin, but I would run out of space.

Flats around here have next to no land and have several industrial bins and that is it.

 

[bloodiedathame]

The revenue generated from collection of domestic recycling will go back to the council to help them offset other costs, so in a way this helps keep your council tax down. You may not see the money going through your hands, but it does make a difference.
PK!

So your saying recycling is a stealth tax (in a sort of odd way)?

 

[Greebo]

So your saying recycling is a stealth tax (in a sort of odd way)?

It is. AFIK Councils get their budget reduced if they fail to hit recycling targets which increase over years. Budget reduced = bigger council tax for you and me.

So really, you can say thay are paying you to recycle otherwise you would pay more.

 

[misterPK]

So your saying recycling is a stealth tax (in a sort of odd way)?

No, I'm saying the money the council get for your tin cans pays for some of your other rubbish to be taken away, so they dont have to add it to your council taxes, or fire some bone idle council middle managers on fat salaries.

PK!

 

[Scania]

I put my empty bottles , cans & tins etc in the plastic bins provided, everything else, in the wheelie bin in black bags.

They increase my council tax and then expect me to sort the **** I pay them to take away..

 

[Greebo]

I put my empty bottles , cans & tins etc in the plastic bins provided, everything else, in the wheelie bin in black bags.

They increase my council tax and then expect me to sort the **** I pay them to take away..

Short sighted though. It hardly takes any extra time to put the right waste in the right containers at source eg your house. It costs major money to sort it all out when mixed up.

 

[Sp00n]

Short sighted though. It hardly takes any extra time to put the right waste in the right containers at source eg your house. It costs major money to sort it all out when mixed up.

But the infrastructure for the sorting is likely to already be in place, no?

 

[Greebo]

But the infrastructure for the sorting is likely to already be in place, no?

Yes. But it's either intensive manual labour with people either side of a conveyor belt sorting the rubbish or paying companies like I used to work for to process it automatically. Sorting manually is not very efficient and doesn't get all the recycling stuff from what goes into landfill though.

The councils can't spend £3m on processing centres because they are not allowed to.

The machines we had were ace. You would get solid bales of aluminium out of them, individual skips full of brown, green and clear glass all broken into bits. Bales of cardboard and bales of plastic.

Because it is sorted a lot of the stuff was sellable. However, I can't remember exactly but I think we used to charge £19 per tonne of rubbish sorted. At the time landfills charged less so it cost the concils more to use us but they had to in order to hit their recycling targets.

My boss had the brainwave for doing it. He put in £3m and 3 years later sold the company for £9m to an Irish firm.

 

[FeFiDoh]

Recycling is very half assed.

You get one small orange box for an entire house, anything outside of this no matter what they will not take.
"You can recycle this much and that is it" had loads of boxes after Christmas and so forth all neatly cut up/folded out with orange bin but they wouldn't take it.

 

[colzboppo]

Reminds me of the simpsons episode where Homer called the bin men "trash eating stinkbags" - but hey, im gonna say it anyway, binmen are a bunch of lazy ******* ********, and all councils suck **** - ***** stupid bins, what a load of ******* *****, ********.

 

[Energize]

Think of how much waste would be saved if manufacturers had to make crisp packets fit the actual amount of crisps. We would enter a golden age.

 

[Sp00n]

Think of how much waste would be saved if manufacturers had to make crisp packets fit the actual amount of crisps. We would enter a golden age.

People would complain that their crisps are all broken.

 

[sammo62]

In Norway we got this recycling deal when it comes to plastic and glass bottles that you bring them back to a shop (they all have the machines for it) and then you get something between 10p and 25p for each bottle you recycle. They then get reused and people have an incentive to recycle them too (even if you pay the extra money when you buy the drink)

Yeah we had that in Germany too - called the Pfand. It was a good idea and most drinks bottles came in one standard 500ml, 1ltr or 2ltr size which made recycling them much more cost effective.

 

[Energize]

People would complain that their crisps are all broken.

That often happens anyway, doubt there would be a difference.

 

[bloodiedathame]

I'd like to see supermarket and food brands make more of an effort to persuade people to 1) Not litter and 2) Recycle. The number of coke cans/bottles etc at the side of the road is awful. Should there not be some sort of responsibility by the manufacturer to make sure their packaging does not end up as litter?

 

[Dewotter]

I'd like to see supermarket and food brands make more of an effort to persuade people to 1) Not litter and 2) Recycle. The number of coke cans/bottles etc at the side of the road is awful. Should there not be some sort of responsibility by the manufacturer to make sure their packaging does not end up as litter?

How? How can Apple or Dell or Tesco stop someone from buying something then disposing with the box or bag in an alleyway. There isn't.

 

[bloodiedathame]

Apple and Dell aren't supermarkets or food brands.

Rightly said, you can't stop someone from buying and disposing, but I think firms should do more to dissuade people from being irresponsible with waste. The least they could do is to try and lessen the litter/waste problem. A few options off the top of my head:
- Packaging in bio-degradable materials.
- Charging for plastic bags (a few shops do this already)
- Reward schemes for recycling

 

[Stretch]

We have 3 bins, it's not much of a hassle.

 

[buzzby]

i think the council make recycling difficult. i have no issue with the concept, just make it easier. You need 3 bins. One for rubbish, one for organic waste and then one for anything that can be recycled.

Then get a bunch of prisoners to sort the recyclable material or a fancy machine to do it.