Personally my recycling wheelie bin is bursting at the seams every fortnight.
Took them 8 weeks to send me replacement bags. That’s getting a private company to deliver them. Guessing the whole system is as efficient.
You should ask my friend Deano what goes on, he’s a digger driver at a recycling plant and the stories he tells would make your hair curl.
For me, recycling isn’t a big deal. My bin is always full etc.
My fiancée however who lives in Germany at the moment, Germany really incentivizes people to recycle and sadly, I think that’s the only way – like giving a dog a bone after it did something good. Sad reality but it’d make people who don’t give a crap want to get a few £ back.
Rhondda Cynon Taf council (I know it isn’t in England shut up) has gotten a lot of flack for where it’s recycling waste goes after Veolia et al collect it from kerbside, but they’ve done a fantastic job with getting residents to recycle AFAICT. Unlimited rolls of recycling bags can be picked up at libraries, leisure centres, supermarket exits and a few other places and they have a well put-together (albeit inadequately advertised) set of webpages for recycling FAQs, including a searchable database of recycling advice for hundreds of different products. If I want to know what disposal method I should use for item X, I just go on the page and type it in the search bar. (Most recycling is common sense so this, for me, applies to when I’m helping my technologically challenged Mum who still lives in RCT)
There is however a huge amount of packaging that is not really recyclable anywhere at the moment. I’ve messaged my MP about tax cuts for products with easy to recycle packaging (and tax hikes for stuff like crisp packets and tetrapaks) but no reply yet.
.
Yes, also, given the magnitude of ecological overshoot our society has achieved recycling is probably not gonna help very much, but the amount that it will help is a lot more than zero.
A big help would be if there were national standards for recyclables and council collections. So much packaging states that is is “widely recyclable” but that’s not great if it’s not recyclable where you live
Where I live they scrapped weekly regular bins collections to every fortnight. Still get recycling every week. Recycling rates went up.
In Denmark, the majority of bottles and cans have a deposit scheme, and you get back a few pennies for every can you take to the machine.
There are even little racks on the side of bins in the street to put them in, so that homeless people can go around collecting them.
The UK _used_ to have a great scheme better than recycling; reuse. Milk bottles got delivered and the empties picked up _by electric milk floats_.
I’d love for us to enact a standardised container system like with milk bottles, but for a wider range of products, and have such a service again. The containers get sent to a facility for cleaning, any damaged are recycled, the reusable ones are used once more to repackage milk, pop, beans- whatever.
Probably because it’s being sent to China for incineration isn’t it?
Tangential but I enjoyed this video about recycling
11 comments
Personally my recycling wheelie bin is bursting at the seams every fortnight.
Took them 8 weeks to send me replacement bags. That’s getting a private company to deliver them. Guessing the whole system is as efficient.
You should ask my friend Deano what goes on, he’s a digger driver at a recycling plant and the stories he tells would make your hair curl.
For me, recycling isn’t a big deal. My bin is always full etc.
My fiancée however who lives in Germany at the moment, Germany really incentivizes people to recycle and sadly, I think that’s the only way – like giving a dog a bone after it did something good. Sad reality but it’d make people who don’t give a crap want to get a few £ back.
Rhondda Cynon Taf council (I know it isn’t in England shut up) has gotten a lot of flack for where it’s recycling waste goes after Veolia et al collect it from kerbside, but they’ve done a fantastic job with getting residents to recycle AFAICT. Unlimited rolls of recycling bags can be picked up at libraries, leisure centres, supermarket exits and a few other places and they have a well put-together (albeit inadequately advertised) set of webpages for recycling FAQs, including a searchable database of recycling advice for hundreds of different products. If I want to know what disposal method I should use for item X, I just go on the page and type it in the search bar. (Most recycling is common sense so this, for me, applies to when I’m helping my technologically challenged Mum who still lives in RCT)
There is however a huge amount of packaging that is not really recyclable anywhere at the moment. I’ve messaged my MP about tax cuts for products with easy to recycle packaging (and tax hikes for stuff like crisp packets and tetrapaks) but no reply yet.
.
Yes, also, given the magnitude of ecological overshoot our society has achieved recycling is probably not gonna help very much, but the amount that it will help is a lot more than zero.
A big help would be if there were national standards for recyclables and council collections. So much packaging states that is is “widely recyclable” but that’s not great if it’s not recyclable where you live
Where I live they scrapped weekly regular bins collections to every fortnight. Still get recycling every week. Recycling rates went up.
In Denmark, the majority of bottles and cans have a deposit scheme, and you get back a few pennies for every can you take to the machine.
There are even little racks on the side of bins in the street to put them in, so that homeless people can go around collecting them.
The UK _used_ to have a great scheme better than recycling; reuse. Milk bottles got delivered and the empties picked up _by electric milk floats_.
I’d love for us to enact a standardised container system like with milk bottles, but for a wider range of products, and have such a service again. The containers get sent to a facility for cleaning, any damaged are recycled, the reusable ones are used once more to repackage milk, pop, beans- whatever.
Probably because it’s being sent to China for incineration isn’t it?
Tangential but I enjoyed this video about recycling
https://youtu.be/PJnJ8mK3Q3g