I expect you recycle stuff. We all do, don't we?
That nice Mr Penn and Mr Teller seem to think it's not a good thing.
Can't say I agree, and I'm quite sure the f words aren't necessary, but anyway, it's mildly entertaining, especially when they get to about ten different bins...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs60OoMxNmY
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Yes, we do. It's a bit of a pain. The shared bins are often full up, as are the rubbish bins, and they are 300 yards away beside the road. Passers-by are suspected of using them. The right bins are supposed to be wheeled out to the road verge on the right day of the week. A fortnight ago a bin and its contents were strewn 100 yards down the road.
It's said anyway that the mixture of paper, paper board, tins, and plastic and glass bottles - these last quite numerous - are mainly chucked into landfill anyway with the rotting food remains, plastic bags and other real garbage. If so the stuff shouldn't be so carefully segregated. They are just making us jump through hoops. But it's true the detritus is easier to handle both for us and for the bin men if glass, paper and other clean rubbish are kept separate from organic waste.
In the third world there are whole communities who live in colossal garbage dumps and make a living by selling recycleable items. It is they who do the recycling although they are despised and looked down on locally for their poverty. But their constant activity has the effect of making the dumps relatively inoffensive to the nose: they don't always smell as bad as you would expect.
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We do too.
Ours is pretty simple. Back bin for landfill and green bin for garden waste etc collected alternate weeks.
Black bin week they also collect card, tins and plastic. Green bin week they take newspaper and glass bottles/jars.
Not too taxing as long as the bins are out the night before.
After June we're supposed to get a thrid bin which will take all paper/glass/card/tins etc and a smaller one for food waste.
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Before I got bored with the Penn and Teller link in the OP, it showed them foisting a whole row of different coloured bins on some conscientious US recyclers. They even appeared to accept a pale brown one for 'lightly soiled toilet paper'. Quite funny, but P&T do have this bawling, bullying style.
Not even in America surely? I know Americans are polite but it's hard to believe that they would buy that. It's just possible though I suppose. A film crew doth make morons of us all...
Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Fri 3 May 13 at 15:31
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Would it be too easy for our scruffy little island to have one national system, OK with variations for flat dwellers and properties without room to store multiple bins?
Our system is four wheelie bin based, small blue for landfill and glass, large brown for compostable garden waste and food, emptied fortnightly on the same day (Thursday). Large grey bin for paper and cardboard, large green for plastic and metal, emptied monthly on an alternating two week cycle (also Thursday). So the cycle runs blue and brown, green, blue and brown, grey. We also have a small "kitchen caddy" brown bin annexe, supplied by the council who also supply bio degradable plastic liners for it.
The council tell us that this hassle is to avoid them getting huge fines from the EU for not recycling.
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Would it be too easy for our scruffy little island to have one national system...?
The post-Thatcher answer is that it would be too hard. Part of the markets-with-everything legacy some chose to celebrate the other week is the fragmentation of public services into the messy, outsourced patchwork we have today. Health authorities have become 'care commissioners', schools are now 'academies', answerable to who-knows-who, and yes, council dustmen are no more and our bins are emptied by whoever offered the best rate this time. Yes, Blair's lot continued the trend when they had the mandate to reverse it, but we have Thatcher to thank for creating the mess in the first place.
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"council dustmen are no more and our bins are emptied by whoever offered the best rate this time. "
And thank goodness they are- I can remember when the council workers did the job. Forever going on strike, strewing rubbish everywhere and angling for a tip at Christmas
The company who deal with ours are the model of efficiency. Modern equipment, good workers and totally reliable. The local recycling centre is similarly well run. 30 year ago it was literally just a tip .
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>> "council dustmen are no more and our bins are emptied by whoever offered the
>> best rate this time. "
>>
>> And thank goodness they are- I can remember when the council workers did the job.
>> Forever going on strike, strewing rubbish everywhere and angling for a tip at Christmas
>>
>> The company who deal with ours are the model of efficiency. Modern equipment, good
>> workers and totally reliable. The local recycling centre is similarly well run. 30 year ago
>> it was literally just a tip .
>>
>>
+1
Ours are a model of efficiency. They collect Mondays: Bank Holiday or not. (Except Christmas Day) Imagine Council Workers working Bank Holidays to collect your rubbish?
Rose tinted glasses views of the past usually are held by people not adult during the 1970s...
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>> Forever going on strike, strewing rubbish everywhere and angling for a tip at Christmas
>>
I remember the binmen too, from before the seventies, well before. They were awful. I made excuses for them at the time, thinking I wouldn't want to do that work, but of course they were quite well paid with short hours. They were an example of the decadent adversarial work culture that prevailed in the country from the mid forties until the eighties.
Personally I think it would have been useful to break that union culture and reform public services without flogging off the business to people who are in it for the money. But perhaps it was too difficult. I am inclined to think so.
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And thank goodness they are...
And all those problems were due to their being public employees, were they? That encapsulates my beef with the whole Thatcher method: numerous babies discarded along with their bathwater. Sloppy labour practices can - and do - occur anywhere, even today. It's poor management that permits them, but that message didn't suit the ideology, so we seldom hear it.
ON's complaint was about fragmented public services. Would anyone argue that Thatcher (or Keith Joseph, who was the real idea generator in her government) didn't begin the fragmentation?
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>>It's poor management that permits them
Absolutely. The problem with public services is not the lousy workers. In time most workers will become lousy if unmanaged and most workers will be good if managed and motivated.
The problem with public services is the atrocious management - be that NHS, Dustmen or the local DSS.
The confusion comes because most Unions prefer lousy management, it makes their life easier.
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>>Forever going on strike, strewing rubbish everywhere and angling for a tip at Christmas
Absolutely.
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Would it be too easy for our scruffy little island to have one national system...?
Tell me about it, system at SP Towers is one, at my brothers is another, and at my mums, yet another. Net result is if anyone is visiting anyone else they're almost bound to use the wrong bin.
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>The post-Thatcher answer is that it would be too hard.
Yeah. Isn't it weird though, how everything she did suddenly became 'too hard' to reverse once her detractors came to power?
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"Would it be too easy for our scruffy little island to have one national system"
No - it wouldn't make economic or environmental sense. What is collected for recycling, how it is segregated and what it is used for varies according to the market value of each waste stream, its weight, what distance it has to be hauled from kerbside collection to final reprocessing and what those reprocessors will do with it.
For example, PET bottles collected in France and the low countries are imported into the British isles to make fleece because their bottle waste is mostly from mineral water and is clean. Our PET bottles are flaked to be used as filler in moulded plastic parts because they tend to be a mix of bottle types (and hence plastics) and contaminated with cola/milk/shampoo etc that makes them smelly.
In contrast, glass was worth £80/ton when I first worked in the area. Plastic was worth £20/ton, so the glass was segregated because it paid to haul a truckload of it 120 miles for reprocessing, whereas a mixed load of glass and plastic didn't. So you can see how the economics are different in central London to rural Scotland, hence the different systems.
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>>In contrast, glass was worth £80/ton when I first worked in the area.
>>
Glass recycling in our area was originally, clear, green and brown in their own bin but now all mixed.
What was sold in those days in green bottles? Gin some whiskeys and wine.
My local winery imported clear bottles from France so where did the geen glass go?.
I was told that the glass cullet was not remelted but crushed for road fill.
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>> Would it be too easy for our scruffy little island to have one national system,
Bin colours should be standard nation-wide. Our recycling bin is grey, but the neighbouring area's is black with a green lid. Our garden bin is green, but the neighbouring area's is brown. I've seen blue bins in one area but I don't know what they're for.
Last edited by: L'escargot on Sat 4 May 13 at 07:22
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>> I've seen blue bins in one area but I don't know what they're
>> for.
>>
Anybody's guess, our blue was paper but is now landfill. Grey was landfill but is now paper, brown has inherited food, and we have a shiny new green one for plastic and tins, OH, and a calendar giving the collection days.
Retirement would be so boring if the bin system wasn't so complicated. :-)
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>> Bin colours should be standard nation-wide. Our recycling bin is grey, but the neighbouring area's
Why? So long as people understand their own area's system it seems fine.
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Yes, but every time you go on holiday there's now reams of instructions and worried ladies telling you not to forget to put the bean cans out on Tuesday unless its raining in which case they can go in the black bin until morning but in that case if you haven't placed the yellow plastic under the glass by 11 then the council will put her in jail.
And I just want to know the way to the beach. Which will of course be covered in rubbish.
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Dog, my man, I can usually make some sort of enjoyable sense of your general ramblings, and the other day I was quite happy with your Crowley reference and toyed with starting a Crowley thread (from which for the sanity of everyone else I refrained).
But for this one. Lovely. What? I don't, I fear, understand that at all! Am I being unusually thick today, which would be a hard push I know. A Finnish woman, I think, wailing faintly melodically whilst another woman does something strange with two giant knitting needles. What am I missing?
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Just think yourself lucky you don't have to live with me Cc - Dog moves in a mysterious way ;)
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A mysterious yaw, surely?
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If 6 turned out to be 9, I don't mind.
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"Why? So long as people understand their own area's system it seems fine."
It's sloppy and offends against all sense of natural order. what is this country coming to when it doesn't have a centralised wheely bin directive. I blame the EU
I bet Mr Farage won't stand for it.
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>>We do too.
>>Ours is pretty simple
>>
Blue lid wheelie - recycling. The contents are all sorted at a high tech plant
Green lid wheelie - landfill
Logical colours???
Small gray caddy ( for the kitchen) - food waste
Larger green caddy for the weeks accumulated food waste
Brown Wheelie or large square green woven sacks for garden waste but extra charge for this.
Food collected evey week and our wheelies alternate weeks.
Kingston on Thames has other colour lids but the main difference is that they supply, for free, a years worth of biodegradable bags for both large and small food caddies.
I found out today that a council near Ascot, on collection of recyclables, weighs the offerings and pays out rewards to the householder.
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Scottish coal have gone into liquidation leaving the local council wringing their hands about reinstating the open cast mines. It would take decades to fill them with refuse, problem solved!
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Can't find the link but there was a Waste / reprocessing plant in the Central belt of Scotland which has recently gone bust.
It was set up with the aid of a whole load of grants and the local councils used them to try and meet their targets.
But apparently there was little demand for the resultant reycled waste.
Edit
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-22313997
Last edited by: BobbyG on Fri 3 May 13 at 21:18
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>> Scottish coal have gone into liquidation
No! Surely not! And I thought coal was fuel fit for the future. ( well I didn't but someone here did)
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I think one of the problems is the price of oil, one of the local open cast mines was a friends farm. While they were co-existing before the farm was completely removed, the weekly diesel fuel bill for the (then small) mine was £16,000. Apparently the business is very sensitive to the price of oil v coal.
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I just wish the manufacturers of our bins had done some development testing. In place of handles, the lids have a lip under which you put your fingers. On windy days the lip acts like an aerofoil and the lid lifts and blows open. The lids of bins in a neighbouring area have handles and they never blow open when it's windy.
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A brick on the lid may help. Not on bin day though, the bin men would call out their management and union. They would in turn call out H&S, and you would never get your bin emptied again, and get fined for modifying the bin.
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Absolutely I do. And I love it.
Leftover food goes in the 'fridge or freezer. Or the cat.
Garden waste goes on the compost heap, together with vegetable kitchen waste (peelings etc). Major hedge work makes for an annual tip to the tip.
Bottles, jars, newspapers etc go in the recycling. Unsorted.
This leaves me with two half-full Waitrose shopping bags of rubbish weekly.
It's certainly much more pleasant, as AC says, not to have it all in one big rotting bag, but to leave the rotting bits to themselves, and to make it as small as possible.
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Do you recycle? - Armel Coussine
