If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Read the community guidelines before posting ✨
Options
Essential support for under 25s
Essential support for under 25s
Take a look around and enjoy reading the discussions. If you'd like to join in, it's really easy to register and then you'll be able to post. If you'd like to learn what this place is all about, head here.
Comments
It does in my area, or at least virtually all of it (I had to pay £5 for my compost bin). Fines are totally acceptable, but only after putting into place proper recycling facilities.
Recycling is expensive and a seperate bin for each item would surely mean that more lorries would have to be sent out each week/fortnight to collect them.
Many places do have services which take away garden waste though, doesn't yours? A composter is a luxury, not a necessity.
Councils also take away recycling left in plastic bags by the box, if it gets too full... Well, our council does.
We live in a first floor flat with no garden. Our address even says "Flat" on it. We wrote back pointing this out and asking them not to bother with a garden waste bin but to send us a recycling bin instead. They said no.
We usually save up all our bottles and lug them to the park to put in the recycling bins there, which is a bus ride away. The only way we can get rid of paper and card, apart from throwing it in the normal bin is to wait until my mum visits in the car (roughly every 4 or 5 months) and then she takes it away to put in their recycling bins, which are actually pretty good. Daventry District Council have always been pretty hot on recycling and have been for a long time. It's a shame other places aren't as good and I think that there needs to be a national scheme for it, rather than just local.
One separate mini rant about the bin collections at my parents is that they are on a monday, but they won't collect on bank holidays so quite often they can go for 3 weeks without collecting the bins. This is especially a problem around Christmas when there is much more unnecessary rubbish.
No, I said separated, i.e. part of the bin for bottles, part of the bin for plastic, etc etc.
But having said that, why are separate bins for separate items not functional? Works very well in Germany and in Scandinavia, even public bins over there have separate sections for paper, glass and other waste.
A composter is much more environmentally friendly than a truck lugging the waste around the city to an industrial composter or incinerator. My council don't take garden waste because they provided "discounted" composters for people.
Besides which, you claim its all about the environment and not about the cash. Which is it?
I expect that the response to a lack of recycling in Europe wasn't to immediately fine anyone who had a bit of rubbish poking out of the top of their bin. I expect that they had a huge amount of effort to get the infrastructure in place, and that's what convinced people to recycle, not the draconian measures that you support.
Hell, I work for a restaurant where we're charged based on how much rubbish we throw away. Now obviously, the logical thing to do for the council would be to offer a cheap rate, or even free pickup for any recyclable rubbish which is sorted and recycled (further reducing the cost of having their non-recyclable rubbish collected). Or perhaps subsidise a private company that offers this service. But do they do that? Absolutely not, so it's a waste of time and effort for any company to sort their rubbish. Hell, we already seperate the glass bottles for safety reasons, but they all end up in the same bin.
I live under the juristiction of Cumbria County Council, and there's a reason why it is England's worst county for recycling. It's nothing to do with the people caring less. They've always been way behind the rest of the country in the uptake of new recycling ideas. We didn't get any recycling collections for a long time after the rest of the country. For some reason, they were way ahead of the game when the new idea involves the opportunity to make a few quid though. :chin: You wanna address real recycling issues, ask the supermarkets what they do with all their expired produce. A supermarket will throw out 11 packets of perfectly good crisps because a 12-pack multipack split open. But as usual, this is of no interest to councils who are always more than happy to bend over and take it up the arse from a national corporation at the expense of the local residents. Ever seen Tesco refused planning permission?
Black bins are collected once a fortnight, garden waste bins are collected once a fortnight.
(Just to be pedantic IWS, if a pack of in date crisps splits open, they get sellotaped up and reduced by 25% rather than thrown away. Out of date stuff goes into the canteen for sales to staff and is removed after a week if it's not sold. That's just grocery items though, stuff off fresh food (where I work) is wasted and thrown away. Our waste is something like £1500 a week. That's a lot of meat and ready meals...)
I guess you're right - it still doesn't sit right with me, the idea it's breaking the law to have your bin overfilled by 4 inches. Just feels wrong. I know the law isn't made just on sentiment but I think sentiment / common sense is one of the prerequisites for most laws. The reason you can't kill someone is because it is 'wrong' (in the sense that we feel it, even without the law being there), and it's the same with being drunk and disorderly - it was massively shunned against in culture to be drunk in public, now it's not so much but there are laws to prevent it.
I've never known anybody who was upset at bins being overfilled by 4 inches. It's the sort of nitpicking that can do more harm than good because people will lose faith in the system which should be a good thing. Same with speed traps on motorways and such.
And Namaste - in germany they have the 4 seperate bins and they have the highest rate of recycling in Europe at 90% of household waste going on to be recycled. So I think we should be following their example.
Many have said it already but I think I should reiterate it - the problem with the current scheme in the UK is it's all stick and no carrot. They want us to recycle more, ALL they have done in our area is to stop weekly collections and we get fortnightly instead, the other week we get a garden waste collection. The recycling is the same as it was before, it comes something like once a month and picks up newspapers only. It might even be a charity, I don't know...