Bottle top & other convert to ca£h scemes?

This may be an urban myth, but I read somewhere about people that collected thousands and thousands of plastic bottle tops for charity, only to find out that it was all a big hoax. If you do hear of somewhere that uses them, I'd be interested to hear!

poorbutrich wrote:

This may be an urban myth, but I read somewhere about people that collected thousands and thousands of plastic bottle tops for charity, only to find out that it was all a big hoax.

That's true. There was a story in the MEN about some girl who organised for her schoolmates to collect plastic milk bottle tops as part of some sort of sponsorship deal to provide a disabled child with a wheelchair (not sure who she thought was sponsoring it, the milk marketing board?). Anyway, it was a hoax but some charity did write to the paper and say they would take all the bottle tops as they could sell them to a recycling centre but that they are a low grade plastic and worth very little.

Gorgeous_George wrote:

The tops are clearly a different kind of plastic to that of the bottle but even so, the volume to weight ratio is likely to make recycling uneconomical

I'm not at all sure that milk bottle caps are a different plastic than the bottles. They seem quite waxy and I think they might well be made of polythene only thicker than the bottles with a bit of colouring agent and opacifier, if not they're probably poypropylene. I rather suspect that the colouring and opacifier make them less recyclable than the bottles themselves rather than more because it would limit their use.

I would recommend crushing your recycling (plastic bottles and aluminium cans) so it takes up less space. If your recycling bin is still always overflowing and you want to minimse your environmental impact you might want to think about whether you could reduce the amount of packaged products you consume in the first place. If you do have overflow from your recycling then the best thing is to carry it to the nearest municpal recycling bins if it is nearby or if it is more than a mile or so, you have mobility problems, or you have a lot of heavy recycling like newspapers then to take it to a recycling centre at a time when you would be using the car anyway, like taking them to the supermarket.

There is definitely a collection in the SW, for an electric wheelchair for 2 year-old Alex Eavis - featured in the Bridgwater Mercury.
Starbucks has agreed for branches to act as collection points, but I'm not sure how widespread that would be (local or national?).

While plastics generally still have to be sorted by eye for recycling which is, as you say, expensive and seriously reduces how economical it is to recycle them, however, some bottles can be identified much more quickly by eye without reference to the number codes simply because bottles of that type are always made from the same type of plastic, i.e. milk bottles are HDPE, pop bottles are PET. Those are the two most widely recycled types of plastic because they are most economically viable to recycle. They are also more economically viable for recycling because they are less likely to be coloured and even when pop bottles are coloured it is normally in a standard range of colours reflecting the colours found in glass bottles, compared to ,say, shampoo and lotion bottles which are normally HDPE or PP and come in a huge variety of colours and shades. There is work underway on automating the sorting of plastic bottles for recycling and thus increasing the range of plastics which are viable for recycling.

Wish everyone in Gloucester knew this as with the recent flood & bottled water system, thousands upon thousands will have been binned.

We were only told to hold onto the bottles for recycling ( something which I actively do already ).