Recycling

So Sheffield city council (aka Veolia) insist we take our plastic to our “local recycling centre”. Until 18 months or so ago, this was the Sainsburys 5 minutes walk away, which we use a couple of times a week. Happy days.

Then they shut it, as apparently it was “being abused”. AKA it never got emptied, so people just left bags of stuff there, next to the full skips, which tore and blew about the place.

So we have to use the Tescos a 10 minute walk in a different direction, which is a dedicated trip with a carrier bag full of rubbish. Perfectly doable, but not an especially efficient use of time.

Except the Tesco recycling point has just been closed – officially because of Veolia strikes, but talking to some of the staff, they doubt it’ll be reopened as it was, again, “being abused”; again, AKA it wasn’t emptied frequently enough.

So now what? We don’t generate that much stuff, but it still builds up. I’ll be ****ed if I’m making a dedicated car journey once a week to get rid of it (the Tip is 15 minutes of stop start driving away) and we don’t have space to store a full car-load’s worth of rubbish. Currently all the carefully washed and saved recycling is going to go to landfill just to get rid of it. That’s nice and environmentally friendly isn’t it?

Then Tetrapacks (again, we generate 1 or 2 a week). They all helpfully say “recycle at store” on the side. But no ****ing store will take them! In theory there’s a particular Waitrose that does (just the one across the whole city), but again, another special, dedicated, trip, and when you get there, its the same Veolia branded bins as all the other stores and no separate recycling for the cartons. So if these “mixed recycling” bins are OK, why do the ones (that were)at the local sites not also take them??? (yes I could choose to pay more for OJ in plastic bottles, but now we can’t get rid of them, either!)

Mostly this is just a vent. But you try and do stuff “right”, and as always, you just get ****ed over. I feel genuinely guilty about chucking all the recyclables in the black bin, but there’s no way its more green to spend half an hour in urban traffic in the car, which is the only alternative!

Seems odd they aren’t collected from your house. But recycling policy varies massively countrywide.

In my bit of Derbyshire we have a recycling wheely bin for glass, cardboard/paper, metal and plastics (hard). Glass is separated in a carrier, but card and plastic goes in the same bin.

The only thing we can’t recycle are soft plastics but my local Tesco takes those (big trolley as you go in the front door).

We try not to buy stuff in Tetrapaks due to the faff  of recycling.

This winds me tf up. Most of the volume of plastic produced in our house week to week is food packaging produced by… Tesco! 4 tomatoes in a huge plastic tray and plastic wrapper, for example; 2 courgettes prepackaged for no earthly reason in a mountain of plastic.

And similarly – they had a (not much-used) plastic recycling bin just inside the main doors to which I took my plastic food packaging every week; last week it had been removed with no sign of why or where it had gone.

In Ireland the bottle/ can recycling is interesting – it seems the rules are if you as a retailer sell items in alu cans or plastic bottles you have to either install a machine that takes them back, or you have to get an exemption. Frankly there should be a legal requirement to do the same for plastic, or large fines for retailers that don’t.

Thats poor from the council – I’ve never lived anywhere that cardboard/paper, plastics & metals aren’t collected by the council. We have just had to start paying for garden waste to be collected which caused uproar (people saying they’ll just put it in their general waste bins etc – good for them if they have room after 2 weeks!) but I believe theres no legal (?) obligation for councils to collect garden waste – is there a legal obligation for councils to collect recycling???

They don’t make it easy.

Anything that doesn’t go in my mixed recycling bin goes in the general waste bin.

I’d like to do more but I don’t drive and the nearest recycling centre is 20 minute bus journey away.

Sorry dolphins.

Our recycling goes into two separate boxes, one for hard plastics and metals, the other for glass. When the truck comes round they tip both boxes into the same container in the truck. If we don’t separate it out into the individual boxes they don’t collect it.

Our local authority issues a wheelie bin, a kitchen waste container and a small bin for compostables, 2 boxes and a big bag. Waste is supposed to go in the appropriate one and be put out for recycling.

I live in a small terraced house and don’t have room for this kind of detailed waste management so I just put all my recycling in one of the boxes. Luckily the collection crew aren’t as daft as Keva’s and are happy to take the one box to the wagon and dump the stuff in the appropriate hole – our wagons actually do have separate compartments. From their point of view I’d guess it’s as easy as taking 2 boxes and a bag, none of which would have much in.

I hear that the cardboard re-cycling bins at Waitrose, Eccy Rd, are being terminated. I’ve had to make quite a few trips to Blackhorse Rd re-cycling and if there’s a queue that can take an age.

2 courgettes prepackaged for no earthly reason in a mountain of plastic.

theres a perfectly good reason….. “Beep”

You need something to reliably stick the barcode to

Just fly-tip it.

There does seem to be a lack of joined-up thinking and zero inconsistency between councils, though I suppose to a degree they’re limited by the resource available to them to move it on.

When I lived in Accrington, Hyndburn BC introduced a recycling scheme which was a white sack for paper and a poxy blue crate for everything else.  There was no way of sealing the bag so every recycling day the streets were covered in paper blown out of the bags.  The council fixed this by recalling the bags and adding a velcro closure, which was an improvement but not by much.  Meanwhile, you could fill the blue box in a weekend.

Eventually they relented and issued two recycling wheelie bins, offset by a monthly collection (general refuse, blue bin, general refuse, white bin, repeat).  Not ideal for a large family but with two of us in the house it mostly worked out alright.

Then I moved to Burnley.  We now have an oversized general waste bin, it’s half as big again as a regular wheelie bin, and we’re back to the stupid bag & crate system again.  It’s like they actively want us to just chuck everything in the bin.

I believe theres no legal (?) obligation for councils to collect garden waste – is there a legal obligation for councils to collect recycling???

Theres a legal requirement to recycle ‘X’ number of different materials, but not to recycle any one thing in particular.. Each council can decide what those x number of things are. What they recycle depends on what deals they can do with recipients of what they collect. Theres no coordination between councils, or rather no national body that coordinates what councils collect.

I don’t believe the recycling plants themselves are council owned, so to a point the councils are limited to the facilities nearby and their capacities.

Here in Salford it’s pretty easy with 4 wheelie bins:

Paper & cardboard (inc. Tetrapak)

Glass, metal and plastic bottles only

Food and garden waste

Everything else (which goes to incineration instead of landfill)

All the nearby supermarkets take soft plastics now, plus batteries.

If I was feeling particularly mischievous I’d find a large card board box and chuck all my recycling in it, when it was full I’d send it using the cheapest method to the Sheffield county council main office, ideally addressed to whoever is responsible for the current shit state of affairs regarding recycling, with a little note explaining why they are receiving it.

Then I’d start filling my next cardboard box…..

Recycling facilities in this country are apalling.

As a Sheffield resident, it suits my agenda (laziness) to put whatever doesn’t go in to the brown or blue bins in to the black bin, as it gets incinerated and used in the community heating scheme.

I tell myself that its better to do that than for it to get shipped round the world to end up in a landfill site where soemone can rummage through it to take to the recycling services where they live, which again may involve shipping it to yet another landfill site elsewhere in the world.

I’ll be ****ed if I’m making a dedicated car journey once a week to get rid of it

Simples. Get yourself a cheapo trailer and ride there.

No need to make a drama out of a crisis.

As someone who in a previous life had to look after recycling bring banks, it’s not about the frequency of emptying. Lazy arseholes just dump stuff around it whether it’s full or not particularly for things other than glass. This encourages fly tipping and also acts as a magnet for arsonists. They aren’t the right way to collect waste and should be condemned to history.

Currently there is a statutory requirement to collect household waste, this could be as simple as residual waste, but does include recycling and food waste if separately collected. Garden waste is not considered to be household waste so does not have to be collected free of charge, the same for DIY wastes. Marking of recyclability is a double edged sword, it helps people to understand whether something CAN be recycled which increases capture rates but does seem to have a lack of understanding that this is only IF the collection is available.

Local Authorities have had a policy vacuum for waste for probably the last decade, the last 3 years have been waiting for the legislation above to crystallize. The early years of the conservative/coalition government there was policy but it was muddled and unhelpful (due entirely to the Rt Hon E Pickles). So what we are left with is Councils with waste collection schemes based on local drivers and budgets. This means that there is a general lack of consistency in collection schemes, broadly I don’t have a problem with that as what works in heavily urban areas is not what works best in leafy suburbs or sparse rural areas but people seem to struggle with a lack of consistency.

There is a requirement coming forward under simpler recycling legislation requiring all councils to collect paper, card, rigid plastics and metals to come into force March 25. Food waste is mandated from ’26. There is also Extended Producer Responsibility where the producers of packaging have to support the collections and Deposit Return Scheme plans as well.

JonEdwards perfect excuse for n+1 .  Cargo bike for the win

I had a brief email conversation with Ashfield Council as to why we could no longer recycle pet1 food trays whereas we could still recycle all pet 1 bottles. It wasn’t just about the material, it was the grade of it too which is why they stopped taking them.  Annoyingly, about 2 miles away Nottingham City Council take them in their bi-weekly collections. I think city council residents can take them to their recycling centres too but we are not allowed as City Council is not under Nottinghamshire County Council remit. We now and again have taken them to near an M&S south of Sheffield city centre (only when visiting Sheffield for other reasons, not just to drop off recycling) but that has been closed down now.

We now have a ton of it mounting up. If anyone knows where you can take pet1 food trays I’m all ears. We do our best to try and find ways to recycle the difficult stuff that the council don’t pick up and obviously try and minimise the purchase of stuff that generates it in the first place,  but we are far from perfect.

Very easy here in Calderdale – brown caddy for food waste, crate for glass, small electrical items and big cardboard, bags for metal/plastic and paper/card.

Which makes me wonder why four of the six people on the row where I live, all younger than me, don’t bother but just chuck it in their landfill bins.

Pop it in the general rubbish, it’ll get burnt, buried, shipped off to god knows where anyway Dispatches. (sad face emoji)

Angus….   We have a paper and cardboard wheelie bin collected 4 weekly and a plastics and metals bin collected 4 weekly, and general waste. collected every two weeks.  So, general, paper, general, plastic, general, paper etc….

There’s a weekly food waste one , but we compost and basically don’t have any food waste.

For some reason they’ve stopped collecting glass , though we have hardly any anyway. We have to take that to the nearest village bottle bank about 2.5 miles way.

I always wonder if it is actually recycled and if so where? Or does it just sit in growing piles of sorted stuff.

Plastics were incinerated in Shetland for the lerwick heat scheme and at time one point they were struggling to keep that running due to recycling reducing the amount of stuff to burn so actually imported some of orkney’s plastic to burn, before then reducing the collection of plastic in Shetland again to keep it running.

You need something to reliably stick the barcode to

Just unwrap at the till & leave the plastic there for Tesco to deal with.

theres a perfectly good reason….. “Beep”

You need something to reliably stick the bar code to

God forbid a person has to use a menu to find the item they are buying.

Funny how Tesco isn’t bothered by such issues in Czechia.

Simples. Get yourself a cheapo trailer and ride there.

No need to make a drama out of a crisis.

Have you ever been to Sheffield? As a driver it’s mental, never mind as a cyclist. It makes Glasgow at it’s worst look good.

Sounds like we have it easy. 1 bin for recycling which everything bar soft plastics can go in, another bin for all the other stuff. I assume they do the sorting elsewhere. Emptied every 2 weeks on an alternating basis.

Old next door neighbour was a special case though. He never put anything in his blue bin so would spend most of his time roaming the back lanes with a black bag in his hand hoping some poor sod had left their bin out because his was full.

Our local authority issues a wheelie bin, a kitchen waste container and a small bin for compostables, 2 boxes and a big bag. Waste is supposed to go in the appropriate one and be put out for recycling.

I live in a small terraced house and don’t have room for this kind of detailed waste management so I just put all my recycling in one of the boxes.

Bristol?  I live in a 2 bed terrace too, I leave the boxes out the front. I try to leave things tidy for the recycling guys but they seem pretty flexible generally. And looking down the street, there are plenty of people that just launch everything into one box (often without cleaning it first!)

I spoke to them once to ask if it made any difference, they did say it’s helpful if you can at least try to Keep things roughly separate, eg plastic on one side of the box, glass on the other

1 bin for recycling which everything bar soft plastics can go in, another bin for all the other stuff. I assume they do the sorting elsewhere.

Oh, I know this one.  This sounds like DMR – Dry Mixed Recycling.

Rochdale:

• Garden/food waste emptied weekly
• BRG bin for general waste, blue bin for paper & cardboard incl. Tetrapaks, blue and green bin for glass, plastic and cans emptied on a three week cycle.

I was led to recycling policy in GM is set by the combined authority?

I don’t know what’s happened to the bottle and can recycling scheme. Ireland has one which seems to work, and parents reckon some Lidls in/around Glasgow have a trial running.

Our local authority issues a wheelie bin, a kitchen waste container and a small bin for compostables, 2 boxes and a big bag. Waste is supposed to go in the appropriate one and be put out for recycling.

I live in a small terraced house and don’t have room for this kind of detailed waste management so I just put all my recycling in one of the boxes.

Further to my previous post,

Our council-issued bag and crate promptly disappeared. It turns out that the kerbside collection – in Burnley at least – will happily take recycling outwith the official containers so long as it’s in clear bags so they can see what it is. Maybe see if that’s acceptable for you? If you’re short on space I can’t see how two half-full bags will take up any more room than one full one.

I don’t know what’s happened to the bottle and can recycling scheme.

I kinda miss the glass bottle deposit system.  As a kid we’d spend the day Wombling for discarded Corona pop bottles, exchanging a couple of carrier bags of the things for an armful of sweets.

St. Helens.

Brown bin – general garbage – fortnightly

Black box – glass – weekly

White bag – cans and plastics – weekly

Blue bag – paper – weekly

Green bag – cardboard weekly

Grey caddy – food recylcing

Green bin – garden waste – fortnightly (chargeable @ £30 pa)

Pretty good really.

 I assume they do the sorting elsewhere.

Yep MRFs aka “murfs”, you get two types. Dirty murfs and clean murfs. One takes dirty stuff the othe neds clean stuff (surprisingly enough)

And generally the reason glass is kept seperate is broken glass particles basically grind the shit out of the conveyors and rolls and stuff.

I may be mistaken, but unless your plastic has a “1” on the recycling sign, (I.e., the purest clear form), it’s not recycled anyway.

our nearest centre is three miles away, but in the next county. So we can’t now use it. The next nearest is in a different council, but they tolerate us. The one that IS run by our council is ten miles away. We don’t use that.

Paris recycling

I kinda miss the glass bottle deposit system.  

I’m amazed we haven’t returned to this. Spending time in Germany and Czechia in the 2000s, it was the norm to just bring bottles back to the supermarket and get some money, took 30 secs to feed the bottles into the machine.

in Germany it was even better- they did it in clubs too, with a large deposit (1 eur in 2003) . Amazing how tidy a club stays when people have a decent incentive not to chuck their crap everywhere!

Amazing how tidy a club stays when people have a decent incentive not to chuck their crap everywhere!

They do this at Download, or at least they did the last time I was there.  10p on a paper beer cup.  It actually created the opposite problem, there were kids going round with stacks like ten feet high, you couldn’t leave your own empties unguarded or someone would be away with them!

We nearly had it back but then the Tories said we weren’t allowed to.

@tired the number is nothing to do with purity, it’s simply an identifier for the type of plastic.

1 is PET

2 is HDPE

5 is PP etc.

I mean you only have to look at some of the replies to see what a gorbals the whole thing is @coyote has 7(!) different containers. What’s the environmental cost of all the plastic in the boxes bags and wheelie bins? I also don’t understand why our blue bin recycling is “glass, cans and plastic bottles”, but strictly no other plastic. What’s the practical difference between a milk bottle and a yoghurt pot??

It feels like the “right” way to do it was the way we had when we lived in London. Black wheelie bin for landfill; orange plastic bag for all recyclables, both collected weekly. Get the recycling properly sorted by someone who’s job it is to understand what’s what and how to do it right. I’m sure at least part of the process is mechanised (eg magnets to pull the ferrous out).

I’d also be quite a fan of moving to a french poubelle style of waste collection. Drop it all off at the end of the street a minute or so’s walk away as and when your home storage is full. But it needs to close to hand, it needs to be emptied regularly – and abusers need to be taken to task, which I suspect is the hardest part of the process!

Just head south of the border. Here in N.E Derbyshire they recycle everything apart from soft plastics, e.g. bags for bread etc. They even take tetra packs.

But yeah why there can’t be a standardised UK wide approach I don’t know. We holiday in the UK and being tofu eating, Guardian eating wokearake we try and recycle. But every location seems to have different rules. It almost makes the various different bike standards look sensible!.

Quite a few holidays in Scotland and they don’t seem to recycle glass, which seems crazy as I understand it’s one of the easiest things to recycle.

Australia- dig a hole and drop it in.
On a serious note though – 3 wheelie bins, 1 medium for general waste emptied weekly, 1 large for recycling (glass, cardboard, tin, aluminium, emptied every 2 weeks, and a large one for biodegradable waste, same as the recycling bin. Although landfill is really cheap, Australia has quite a focus on recycling that started out of the paper industry. This now extends to glass as well, but we behind on plastic with the exception of PET.

Probably doesn’t deserve a new thread, but this kinda blew my mind!