Wheelie bins! How many do you have?

[Theseus]

2 ...

Black for general houshold rubbish (collected alternate weeks)
Brown for garden waste (collected alternate weeks except middle of winter)

But we have red and blue boxes for recycling. The red is for glass & tins, the blue for paper/card & plastic bottles. These are both collected weekly.

 

[magnatom]

2. One for general rubbish and one for garden waste. We also have two boxes that between them take glass bottles, cans, paper, and plastic bottles and a bag for cardboard. It's a fair amount to take out and bring back in!

 

[Arch]

2.


One Green lidded one for all recycling (which is pretty much everything apart from nappies and dead animals).

You're posh. We collect from areas where they think both of those are recyclable...

 

[Arch]

Oh, and as a 'professional', I reckon the variety of replies here shows why we are so crap at recycling and waste in this country - un joined up policy. Even within York, there are differences in what gets collected and how often, although we're moving towards a single policy now.

 

[accountantpete]

4 spying devices each of which comes with a wheely bin attached.

 

[Speicher]

In Worcestershire we have a factory that sorts recycling automatically.
There is an "interesting" video.

I have a green bin for all recycling, including tetrapaks, but excluding aluminium foil (which I take to Oxfam for recycling).

A brown bin for garden waste.

Little blue bin for food waste, ie fruit/veg peelings etc

A black bin, which is almost redundant.

I also have a compost bin, to compost paper/cardboard contaminated with food, and some garden waste.

 

[Arch]

We had a German girl volunteering with us recently, and she said cans for food are virtually obsolete in Germany, they use tetrapacks, which are easily recycled - but then I gather that THE recycling plant for tetrapacks is in Germany.

Plus of course, they have deposits on bottles, so those are recycled sensibly.

 

[Speicher]

According to Envirosort there is a tetrapack recycling plant in Sweden. IIRC there is also one in Hereford.

I would be the first to admit that sorting recycling properly takes time, and not everyone has that time.

Long story short I sometimes take in "recycling" from a local village hall. I can see what Arch means about some people's idea of recyling - very messy.

 

[dodgy]

3 here, brown for garden waste, green for general and grey for recycling.
It's a pain in the arse, I can never remember what day is which in terms of bins to put out!

 

[GrasB]

We have 2 bins; a black general waste bin & a green compostable waste bin. We also have a load of boxes which are completely unused as the single bin recycling system at work is really easy to use & takes a far more (main exclusions are food & green waste, light bulbs/tubes, electronic goods, polystyrene).

I'd really like to know why a private company can make a recycling system that works well & is so damn simple but the council struggle with loads of boxes etc. & all kinds of seemingly arbitrary restrictions.

 

[Arch]

According to Envirosort there is a tetrapack recycling plant in Sweden. IIRC there is also one in Hereford.

I would be the first to admit that sorting recycling properly takes time, and not everyone has that time.

Long story short I sometimes take in "recycling" from a local village hall. I can see what Arch means about some people's idea of recyling - very messy.

I'm glad if there are more plants - there was one in Scotland, you could post flattened packs to them, but it closed.

I slightly disagree about the time to sort. The trick it to do it instantly. Use a tin of beans? Rinse it straight away, and put it in the right box (or bag within the box. It becomes a chore when you put a load of stuff together and then have to re-sort it. I know I have an advantage being on my own, and not having to walk far from my kitchen to my hall, but it's not really difficult, if you just think about it a bit. The trouble is that for too long, no one has had to think about their rubbish, it just disappears like magic.

We don't mind the sorting so much, although it's more efficient if stuff is presorted for us, and put into separate open bags. What is a pain is when people put out a box, full of bags, each knotted and containing a mixture of stuff. Try unknotting a plastic bag with industrial gloves on, and then pulling out the (probably wet) contents one at a time...

The council have wagons that everything just gets chucked in, for someone to sort later on a conveyor - perhaps more efficient at the kerbside, but more work at a later stage...

 

[Fnaar]

General rubbish gets taken once a fortnight.
Recycling (paper, card, plastic (not shopping bags) tins/cans) get taken the in-between weeks.
Bottles/jars we take as & when to the bottle bank.
Started composting 3 or 4 yrs ago... dramatically cut down waste. We tend to generate 2 black bags a fortnight, family of five.

 

[Arch]

In Worcestershire we have a factory that sorts recycling automatically.
There is an "interesting" video.

Interesting.

One thing that throws up, for me, is the squashing plastics and cans thing. Fine for the machine, but it means that boxes can often overflow, and collection will less efficient in terms of space: if cans and plastic - especially plastic - were all squashed, even a little bit, we could collect twice as much per trip. If your trips are done in a truck, that's half the fuel use etc (for us, it's a question of charge on the truck, or muscle power, and time.) On some of our days, the limiting factor per trip is the volume of plastic we've picked up, not the weight of the other stuff. We do try to squash as we go along, but if people have put the caps back on it all takes time. Oh, and of course, it's so lovely, taking the lid off a bottle of rancid milk dregs, because they haven't rinsed it out (or in some cases, bothered to finish the milk!)

 

[Rhythm Thief]

Garden Waste is a mystery to me. If you have a garden big enough to generate waste, you have room for a compost bin, surely?

Yep. We don't have a garden waste bin, but if we did, it wouldn't get used. All our organic waste gets composted.
We have some bags, which take light cardboard, plastic bottles and tin cans, but we have no doorstep glass collection. Which is odd. We take bottles to the tip ourselves. Oh, and we're not allowed to squash our cans either. Although I'm thinking of saving them in my scrap box and weighing them in with all the other metal.

 

[magnatom]

Aye, we had a homebuilt composter at our old house. We need to build a new one at our new house. It makes a big difference. We also used Bokashi to enable us to compost cooked food. This is particularly useful when you have three young kids!