Nine Recycling Bins
Newcastle-under-Lyme Council must take the award for the world’s most complicated and wasteful recycling system. Nine bins is just too much!
I now live in Hackney, where the system is fairly simple. On Monday they collect household waste and on Thursday the recyclables like paper, bottles and cans go out in green boxes. It works well, except that if I leave my green box outside on my front patio, it collects all sorts of non-recyclables, which I have to remove. Someone also puts an empty can of Stella in there too every night. I hope my doctor doesn’t see it, as he’ll think my gluten-free diet has slipped. The men actually sort the recyclables on the truck, which would seem to be inefficient, but it seems to work well.
In St. Edmundsbury, I had two bins; one for general waste and the other for dry recyclables. They were collected on alternate weeks. There is a great deal of opposition to fortnightly collection, but I never found it a problem.
Surely, we need a national system or perhaps two or three systems that councils would have to use. This would stop confusion and might mean that equipment for a particular scheme would be cheaper. It would also mean that lunatic nine-bin schemes were illegal.
I did try to find a national table of recycling performance on the web, but couldn’t. So if anybody can please tell me!
The Anonymous Widower 
We have had various systems over the past few years. Since I cant physically deal with the wheelie bins, I am not sure what happens when. We have nothing in the garden waste type bin, it all goes into compost on the allotment as does all our food waste – which is actually a very very tiny amount rarely more than teabags, eggshells, fruit and veg peelings.
Nine bins is unbelievable – we have I think 4.
Comment by liz | February 17, 2011 |
I think the key to a good recycling system is good staff, who tell you what to do in a nice way, if you get it wrong or don’t understand the system. I’ve certainly got those here in Hackney and I had them in St. Edmundsbury.
I tend to belive that the better the staff, the more that gets recycled.
Comment by AnonW | February 17, 2011 |
The staff on our bins seem really friendly and helpful. They are often in the comparatively narrow side road where I park my car on a Wednesday morning as I am going out, and they always make sure I can get out by moving the lorry. And they smile as well.
Comment by liz | February 17, 2011 |
When I was a lad bottles were not recycled; they were reused. Beer bottles and pop bottles were returned to the retailers and collected on the same vehicle that delivered the full ones. The only cost was washing them and bottles were reused many times before being scrapped. Nowadays they could be recycled when past their usage life, and this wouild be a lower cost operation due to the fewer locations and bulk involved.
I am all in favour of recycling; however, reuse is much greener, and I would like to see some more evidence of the benefits of some of the recycling. Recyling involves the use of a lot of energy (transport, reprocessing) and I have a suspicion that some recycling is simply for the political reason of achieving a target based on volume recycled not on any green measurement. We had this with the car scrappage scheme. The carbon used by a car is over 50% from the maunfacture and disposal of the vehicle, and the rest from the fuel and oil used. The longer the life of a car the better for the environment, especially as newer cars contain more plastic and hence are less green from the mnaufacturing/disposal perspective.
It would actually be much greener to develop ways of making older cars more fuel efficient and less polluting (e.g. new engines to fit 5 or 10 year old cars, new chips for EMUs, new exhaust systems). Many older cars are still in excellent condition and olny need low cost modifications to make them greener.
Comment by John | February 17, 2011 |
I thought the scrappage was also to boost the car industry.
We were recycling and reusing 25/30 years ago when people thought we were some sort of crazy hippies. We are neither of us much convinced about global warming, we just dont see the point of throwing away things which could be re-used.
Comment by liz | February 17, 2011 |