What're your recycling habits?

[estebanrey]

Just some info for many people from someone who works in the industry...

The recycling policy of your given council is almost exclusively decided by the private company who run the local recycling plant. If you live somewhere with numerous receptacles it will be because your local plant insists on receiving the waste like that, not because some councillors wanted more bureaucracy.

I live in the same district as the council I work for so obviously do quite well. We have two 'main' bins (one for general household waste and one for recycling) and also food caddies (collected weekly) and a subscription based garden waste scheme.

Professionally speaking households aren't too much of a problem, it's flat sites that terrible at recycling. I'm sure many people who lie in flats so their bit but all it takes is one resident to throw his general waste in the recycling and the whole bin is marked contaminated and taken the next week to landfill.

It's funny because I see the stats behind recycling rates in different areas of the city and there is a strong correlation between wealth and ability to recycle. The poorer areas overwhelmly don't recycle as much as more affluent areas.

 

[johnny6]

I've never understood why these types of things aren't managed more centrally. Every council seems to have different types and colours of bin. Also I've never understood the reasoning of people who can recycle with relative ease but actively choose not to and chuck everything in general waste.

Slough council here with weekly collections

1x Black wheelie bin for general waste
2x Red wheelie bin for recyclables
1x Green wheelie bin for garden waste

Don't really bother with the garden waste side of things. Anything which can go in the red recycling bin does, everything else either goes in the general waste bin or gets recycled elsewhere (batteries, plastic bags etc to the local supermarket. Waste wood, larger metal items, electricals etc to the local council recycling centre).

Family of 3 and most weeks we have less than 1 bag of general waste.

 

[Destination]

Brown bin, garden waste and food waste, small brown bin in kitchen with biodegradable bags, so you can hurf the food waste from the kitchen into the outside big brown bin when it is full.

Green bin, for plastics, cardboard, paper, tins, cans.

Blue/Black bin for general waste, or waste which doesn't apply above.

Amazingly they do not have any facility for glass recycling unless you wish to save it up and drive to the local centre and recycle directly.
Where I lived previously had two recycle boxes, one for plastic, one for glass. This council doesn't recycle glass directly.

 

[Grimley]

3 Bins here, I try to recycle what I can.

All grey - Recyclables
Green & yellow - Food and garden waste
Grey with purple lid - things that cannot be recycled.

collected every other week- green & yellow is weekly.

Clothes get either donated or to cash for clothes, stuff that cant go in the bins goes to the tip/recycling centre 5 minutes down the road.

 

[Xordium]

We get 3 bins that are emptied fortnightly - Garden Waste, Paper, Plastic and Glass. They do all the sorting in the later. Over and above that clothes and shoes get sent to school so they can make a bit of money as do unused books and toys etc.

 

[estebanrey]

I've never understood why these types of things aren't managed more centrally. Every council seems to have different types and colours of bin.

As I said above, each council will use different privately owned recycling plants who tell the council how they will accept the waste. If they don't accept mixed recycling then the council won't collect it that way.

As for no standardisation on types of bins there are a couple of reasons for this. There are a number of different manufacturers of wheelie bins, if you set a 'standard' type that all councils had to use you would create an unfair monopoly for one company and more expensive bins as a result.

In terms of the colour alone, I agree that if you were to restart from scratch there probably would be standard colours. But recycling policies have evolved at different rates, in different parts of the country and it is too expensive and logistically difficult to recall every bin in the city/county just so you can standardise.

For example, where I work we have a green bin for landfill and a blue one for recycling and if I had a pound for every time someone has asked me why the recycling one isn't 'green' I'd be a millionaire. The reason in our case is because 5 years ago we didn't have blue recycling bins; we had boxes and no one commented on green being silly for landfill.

Only when our recycling plant adapted to take mixed recycling could we introduce a single bin for all recycling and at that point we already had 60,000 green landfill bins out there (at £25 a pop). So should we have used £2 million pounds of public money just so the colour of our bins met some kind analogy? Not to mention the confusion it would have caused at the time by swapping colours mid collections.

 

[Bear]

It's funny because I see the stats behind recycling rates in different areas of the city and there is a strong correlation between wealth and ability to recycle. The poorer areas overwhelmly don't recycle as much as more affluent areas.

Not surprised at all. On the road I live on you can tell which are the poor households by the rubbish. Most well to do houses have recycling bins out with a bag or two of rubbish, the poor households have about 4 or 5 bags of rubbish out a week and no recycling at all.

 

[johnny6]

As I said above, each council will use different privately owned recycling plants who tell the council how they will accept the waste. If they don't accept mixed recycling then the council won't collect it that way.

As for no standardisation on types of bins there are a couple of reasons for this. There are a number of different manufacturers of wheelie bins, if you set a 'standard' type that all councils had to use you would create an unfair monopoly for one company and more expensive bins as a result.

In terms of the colour alone, I agree that if you were to restart from scratch there probably would be standard colours. But recycling policies have evolved at different rates, in different parts of the country and it is too expensive and logistically difficult to recall every bin in the city/county just so you can standardise.

For example, where I work we have a green bin for landfill and a blue one for recycling and if I had a pound for every time someone has asked me why the recycling one isn't 'green' I'd be a millionaire. The reason in our case is because 5 years ago we didn't have blue recycling bins; we had boxes and no one commented on green being silly for landfill.

Only when our recycling plant adapted to take mixed recycling could we introduce a single bin for all recycling and at that point we already had 60,000 green landfill bins out there (at £25 a pop). So should we have used £2 million pounds of public money just so the colour of our bins met some kind analogy? Not to mention the confusion it would have caused at the time by swapping colours mid collections.

Oh I completely understand that we are where we are now and have to make do, just would have been nice to think the powers that be were intelligent enough to have a long term master plan.

Last time we visited the wife's aunt they were still using plastic bags, not a wheelie bin in sight. It felt like going back in time.

 

[Moothead2]

Things like bottles, tin cans and drink cans go in the recycling bin and then rest go in the bin.

 

[Dyson]

We sort our rubbish into two bins, Grey - General, Green - Recyclable.

I don't wash/rinse anything out though, just put tins etc in "as is".

 

[russell664]

We have two bins in Nottinghamshire (Well in the Worksop Area anyway)

A green - For general waste.

A Blue for recyclable waste.

 

[esoteric]

Two bins where I live, a black lid bin for general waste and a green lid bin for recyclables, paper/card, plastic and cans.

 

[Bobcat]

We do the usual green/pink bags with the odd week when your allowed a black bag, but we always try to stick to no black bag unless necessary.

The one part I hate, the food recycling, I don't understand it and hate just the thought of rotting smelling food tucked away under the sink, so try to keep it all outside, but its still meh....what's the alternative though (genuinely interested), waste disposal hooked into the sink to grind up to go into the drains, as that can't be good for the environment?

 

[Hades]

Two wheelie bins... Green for normal waste and blue for recycle (glass, cardboard, plastic, metal).

Anything easy to separate or rinse goes in the recycle bin. Everything else in the standard bin. If it is a pain to separate then it just goes in the normal one. They probably end up in the same landfill anyway.

They also give us a food recycling bin and warned the street on pain of death to use it. So obviously no-one bothers as we don't want it stinking the kitchen for a week.

 

[PapaLazaru]

Black wheelie bin for household, red for mixed recycling but no glass.

I compost all my food waste and the glass goes to the recycling centre once a month.

Apparently our household waste in Berkshire mainly gets incinerated at that big futuristic building near Heathrow Terminal 5.

 

[BennyC]

We had seperate recycling bins for about 2 weeks after I moved in which were replaced by mixed recycling.

I follow the guide, removing things like film & plastics I know aren't recyclable.

If I'm washing up I'll give things a rinse (to stop the bin smelling), if the bins are due for collection in the next day or two somethings might go in unwashed. I figure it's all going to get washed again at the recycling plant...

Recycling definitely makes me conscious of the waste we produce and I try to be as economical as possible in this regard.

(We have separate food & refuse bins too)

 

[estebanrey]

Oh I completely understand that we are where we are now and have to make do, just would have been nice to think the powers that be were intelligent enough to have a long term master plan.

As a senior manager said to me the other day, it's easy to criticise with hindsight and its important to remember that whilst a decision made a while ago seems wrong now, it may have well been the best thing to do at the time.

Why green was chosen for our landfill bins I don't know, but it's possible that at the time (I wasn't there then so don't know) our suppliers had a big run of green bins they were making for another council and offered us a big discount on that colour so they could do one big manufacturing run.

 

[Felix Da Housecat]

We have the following

Black bin for landfill
Green bin for garden waste
Black box for glass
Black box for paper and card
Green box for plastic and metal

We recycle as much as we can but we don't have food recycling so that goes in the black bin.

 

[mrbazmondo]

In my previous house we separated everything. Here We have mixed recycling which just seems odd. Wash things out at the end of the washing up so the bin doesn't smell. Food goes in the compost. Pretty much the only thing that goes in the proper waste is plastic wrapping + bags.

At work its a different story - No facilities to recycle anything. We used to separate but the cleaners just threw it all in together.

 

[estebanrey]

At work its a different story - No facilities to recycle anything. We used to separate but the cleaners just threw it all in together.

I know working in the industry I'm biased but I think there should be laws that force businesses to take reasonable steps to recycle.

We offer a reduced rate for collecting commercial recycling and don't charge any hire fees for the recycling bins but even so there are a number of companies that still are happy to pay the extra rather than recycle.

Just look at your Maccy D's, Burger Kings and KFCs of this world. If you eat in what happens when you finish your meal? That's right it all goes it one bin. All you have is food and card which are both recyclable. I went to a service station a while ago and they had two bins, one for food and the other for packaging which I thought was brilliant.

The amount of energy we could produce from the food waste from just the big fast food chains would be immense. But of course that would mean them having to ask their customers to take 10 seconds of their time which they're too afraid to do (first anyway).