The Avery household was thrown into paroxysms of self-doubt, mutual recrimination and abject shame when our recycling was rejected by the bin emptiers with a red tag of shame almost two weeks ago. We’re hoping to make the grade this week.
Of course it was my fault. I had put a bag which I regarded as paper (which once held Co-op loose tea leaves), into the recycling bin when it is a kind of plastic-like paper. At least that is the only explanation we could come up with. Let’s hope none of the neighbours noticed.
I wonder whether there ought to be a system where the non-recyclable rubbish bin, into which we put very little each fornight, is checked for recycling and rejected if it contains too much recyclable material. That would make quite a lot of sense. Even if not given a red tag of shame and rejected maybe an amber tag of encouragment would be in order. I almost feel like creeping around the neighbourhood on bin night and tagging some bins. Hmmm….
We can’t even recycle the red tag of shame – that seems to be made of plastic too – ironic or what?
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I am so thankful to live in the last remaining council in Britain which just operates a one bin policy. I could honestly not cope with the hassle of sorting this that and the other. I think it is one of the reasons behind the persisting prevalence of flytipping. As soon as you put a barrier, no matter how small, to a service then people will just stop using that service.
We’ve already seen an increase in flytipping round here now that the council is operating a policy of booking a slot at the local cowp due to covid. As soon as they started saying you needed to book a slot and turn up at a specific time to tip your large household rubbish, people decided that flytipping was something they could do in their own time and without worrying about missing their slot.
Recycling is too important to leave it to bureaucracy and labels. It needs to be sorted at destination, not source.
Try living next to a stinking incinerator, landfill site or pyrolysis station where they try to sweeten the stench by spraying sickly sprays. Try living next to a waste plant when the stench is the worst in the summer when you want to be outside with your windows open. Try putting up with massive swarms of flies and other unwanted visitors. Try putting up with the dangerous emissions and the lies that the company, council, HSE and EA are happy to spread about these places being tightly regulated.
Just because government refuses to try and introduce a zero waste policy and recycling takes a little effort on the part of residents and some people think sorting things into waste and recyclates is too bothersome.
No it needs to be separated at source not destination. The idea that people and/or machinery should separate items that have been put in one bin item by item is ludicrous. Even if they conscientiously and efficiently did so the amount of cross contamination would reduce the quality and quantity of what can be recycled which is exactly why the Chinese rightly refused to take anymore containers of crap from the UK and others just so the authorities could tick the ‘Recycled’ box. There are ‘recycling’ companies who tell businesses not to worry they will take away their rubbish and separate for recycling. These companies tend to have access to dirty great landfill sites and ‘recycle’ by turning rubbish into fuel pellets for incineration. Funny how two entirely different processes can conveniently be called recycling.
You have got things completely the wrong way round, take it from someone who worked in kerbside recycling, was the recycling coordinator at two festivals and ran a commercial recycling run in Edinburgh. By the sound of it you live in Dumfries and Galloway and they’ve been a bloody disaster recycling wise. Too many Scots have difficulty using any bins, even by British standards we’re disgusting litter bugs, so no wonder having to use two or more bins for recycling – “Ohh when will this tyranny ever cease!!!” – is just too much effort. The British in general and the Scots in particular need a foot up the bloody arse https://zerowaste.co.nz/campaign-for-real-recycling/
That you are in well middle class Edinburgh [or England in Scotland] tells me all I need to know about your opinion. Take it from a disabled person living in a block of flats, sorting and hauling multiple boxes of different rubbish down three flights of stairs is a non starter. Get on yer tram.
Actually Random I’m Scottish and live in a block of flats on the outskirts of Falkirk – and a studio flat at that if this is going to turn into a battle of weeping violins. You still have the same weight of ‘rubbish’ to deal with whether or not it’s recycled BTW. If you do have a genuine disability that makes this difficult the answer is extra provision to help you – for instance council staff know that there are homes with elderly/disabled people where they’ll bring out then return heavy refuse and garden waste bins. Do you think because you struggle everybody else should be deprived of an opportunity to do what they can? Have you contacted the council to ask for extra help? And if you think bigotry isn’t bigotry because it’s aimed at English people then that shows where your real problem lies.
Oh, you are a story topper. I say I live in flats well you say you’ve got a studio. If I’d said I lived in those you’d have said you had a caravan on the roof. No, wait, a tent, but it isnae on the roof but on top of the liftshaft machinery. Aye, right. You middle class eejit.
The council barely helps when it is forced to, and they never offered a service to get stuff down the stairs for you.
Brilliant Les, well said!
Random
In the UK, the recycling market is only profitable when clean, uncontaminated material is provided to it. The reason glass or paper is collected separately by different councils is that if glass shatters it will contaminate the bulk of the paper in the recycling and this will have to be dumped. You simply can’t have glass shards in amongst paper. Consequently, councils try to minimise this problem by asking residents to put either their glass bottles or their paper in separate boxes.
Your suggestion that everyone simply uses one bin would render the recycling industry pointless. They can’t recycle it because it is contaminated with glass, putrefying food, dangerous substances like cleaning fluids, disinfectants, pesticides, weedkiller, paint etc etc.
If councils all introduced food waste collection services, as well as recycling, waste and hazardous substances collections (for materials like glass, batteries, cleaning fluids, weed killers, disinfectants, petrol etc etc then the remaining waste put in bins would be much less hazardous.
In my opinion, no-one should have to put up with the (literally) sickening practices of the waste industry.
The government should be introducing zero waste policies that address packaging and the life-cycle of products from virgin materials to the final stages of decomposition. We simply shouldn’t be manufacturing products that cannot be composted or recycled and that have an environmental impact. Our planet cannot sustain infinite product growth and the pollution impacts that our government allows to take place.
If climate change is to be averted then the waste industry and residents need to take waste production seriously. Zero waste, composting, recycling, collection of hazardous materials and lower impact lifestyles need to be addressed – and addressed as a priority issue.
“In the UK, the recycling market is only profitable when clean, uncontaminated material is provided to it.”
You’re so close to getting it. So close. Now tell me where you think you went wrong there. I’ll give you a clue, it is the same underlying assumption which has laid waste to every public service in Britain for the last forty-thirty years. Take that out the equation, and put in instead that recycling works well when it supports good service delivery and full employment.
Hmm! Interesting. I wonder if this approach improves recycling rates. For a household committed to being environmentally responsible it might be just a bit embarassing and puzzling but those whose commitment was not that high in the first place might simply say ‘ah f*ck it’ if their bin is not collected for a similar error.
One of the problems we have in the UK is a rather confusing system for recycling with different local authorities accepting/refusing different materials and lots of product packaging marked as ‘recyclable’ that is not necessarily accepted for recycling by all authorities. If a bin is obviously contaminated with clearly non-recyclable materials then I would not have a problem with it being left uncollected (and likewise a ‘residual’ waste bin that was full of recyclables) but if the authority are too nit picky about single items of ambiguous status with respect to the rules, then I think they risk being counter-productive.
We have 3 recycling boxes, a green one for glass bottles etc which must be unbroken. A red one for hard plastics and metal cans and a blue one for paper and cardboard. They are emptied every week although our non recycling bins are emptied once a month– rubbish must be bagged. Surely the red tag of shame only works if you know how you transgressed otherwise it is a little pointless.
Paul
Your council is actually recycling in the manner preferred by the recycling industry but you are absolutely right – the public need to be informed what they have done wrong when they make mistakes. The red tags of shame should be red alert tags with tick boxes to highlight the likely cause of the problem so residents can change their behaviour. Unfortunately such practices take time so councils increasingly prefer to dump all their recycling in one bin and get poorly paid staff working in stinking conditions to separate out the recyclates and contaminants. Unfortunately, education costs and, at the moment, education costs more than the loss incurred from the landfill tax due to recyclates that have to be dumped because they have been contaminated.
Industry should recycle in the way preferred by the public, not the other way around.
Well informed and conscientious members of the public recycle in the best way for recycling which is source separation – or do you prefer people on pathetic wages having to spend hours standing at stinking conveyor belts picking apart plastic and paper from food waste, old nappies, the content of vacuum cleaner bags and floor sweepings? You’ve lost so ‘suck it up’, you’re just humiliating yourself. BTW I do live in a studio flat it’s in the last block in Alyth Drive, Polmont – sure you can google it somehow, I’ve been here since 2001. Most of us have no need to try and ‘top’ anyone else and if you think playing the martyr allow you to be nasty and a bigot you are very much mistaken.
This touches upon so many issues – lack of design for reuse and recycling, plus so little done to reduce waste at source. Then there’s the lack of markets for recycled material – it would have been nice if this had been done before recycling schemes were set up, years after that they still haven’t. And of course dire public communication/education. One thing that would help is a strong theory and practice package in schools (finally) which would not only lead to children pestering their parents to recycle, but inform them how to do it properly according to local authority requirements. Great to see so many commentators here who feel strongly about this too.
While we all sort out rubbish for recycling many very large businesses do not recycle anything.
I have worked in various large distribution centres recently where nothing is recycled. They even throw away food within sell by date instead of sending to food banks or even offering to staff.
It makes a total mockery of what we all do as individual households.
Another law for us and not for them!
Not far off my experience where I found the recycling was often token, and usually inadequate/inefficient within the companies I worked for. We should have sites where images can be uploaded of material being dumped by companies when it could be reused which would be tremendously bad publicity. I think this is a vital feature, but I’m not an IT person and is there a legal issue re taking photos without permission? Every area should have such a site. A few years ago there was a scheme where materials from schools that were closing was offered to groups who could use it – old instruments from the music department were an example. At the same time a central government building a couple of miles away was refurbished and office furniture, filing cabinets, stationery etc were sent to landfill. It was felt that these couldn’t be offered to anyone as they had been originally bought with public money so couldn’t be disposed of in what could have been regarded as a preferential manner!?! Two forms of government, two entirely different rationales – crazy, but standard.