Sick of recycling - should I stop?

JennyB

I am completely sick of recycling and here's why. My local council only collects paper, glass and cans; I recycle paper, cardboard, glass, cans, plastic, green waste. I am a recycling saint - I recycle everything I can at a cost to me in time and money. My problem is two-fold:

1. I hate saving the things for recycling. I sometimes feel my house has regressed to times when there was no rubbish collection. I have baskets for recycling at the end of the garden and I collect the materials in the house and intermittently take them to the end of the garden. This means various containers in the kitchen full of different recycling. It looks horrible - it looks like we hoard rubbish. Plastic is really bulky which means that our containers quickly fill up and we end up using bin bags... my expensive recycled plastic bin bags :rolleyes: . My partner drinks a lot of cider ( ) and I can confirm that slugs are attracted to cider - cue stomach churning job of taking slug infested recycling to the tip.

2. I hate taking the things to the tip to be recycled. I have a basket full of glass and cans which the council collects. However for the sake of limiting the number of baskets I have I do not sort my paper and cardboard (the council would collect only the paper) and therefore take it all to the tip along with the plastic and green waste. This means time at a cost to me and petrol at a cost to the environment. The tip is about a 5 minute drive. My car has been ruined by doing this. Having the baskets in the garden means they fill with water and slugs and worms and just generally get dirty. The job is disgusting and it makes my car dirty. When I get to the tip there's often a very long que. Once at the end of it I find that all the containers are overflowing and I struggle to find anywhere to put my own recycling. I normally get filthy. I also only have a smart car which is hopelessly small and I end up having to use the passenger seat as well as the boot, both of which get dirty. It is also completely hopeless when I have a serious batch of festering green waste which often won't fit in the car at all until I've spent hours chopping up all of the branches.

I've been recycling since the very beginning and I've just had enough of it. I would have no problem with it if the council just collected it all but I'm sick of feeling like my house is covered in rubbish and I'm sick of the mess it makes of my car and the time it takes to take it to the tip and how disgusting the job is. And then to top it all off I read stories like this which make it all seem like it's really not worth doing anyway.

What does everyone think? I feel guilty about it but I just want jack it all in, or rather to cut back to only recyling what the council will collect. I've always wanted to do everything I can for the sake of the environment but I'm tired of doing so much when sometimes it just seems like it's not really worth it.

Sorry for the essay - just been down to the tip :rolleyes:

Cardew

Couldn't agree more.

My garden is turned into a temporary rubbish tip and I still use a lot of petrol and waste a lot of time in trips to the distant tip(sorry recycling facility) - a 20 minute drive.

hjb123

I can sort of agree though there are quite a few places nearby that do do recycling - supermarkets etc. So when we go to the supermarket we just chuck a load of recycling in the boot and offload it at the recycling facilities there or any other nearby ones.

headcovers

Gosh, it's so good to hear of someone else with the same problem and thoughts. My council is the same, only recycles glass, tin and paper. Everything else has to go to the recycling centre which is a 25 mile round trip!

My house looks like a tip too and in addition I compost what I can, but as my composter is right at the end of a 100 foot garden and through a garden gate, I use a kitchen caddy which in this weather keeps attracting tiny flies.

I'm truly fed up of it all as well.

chatta

Trouble is when we are breathing our last breaths and up to our ears in waste, will blaming our 'council' save us (I dont think so)
Keep it up folks. :A I love the feeling I get when I leave the recycling centre it more than makes up for the feeling I feel to the tw@ts that are in charge of my councils 'recycling policy'

Seakay

I expect that you've looked into this, but does your Council do collections from houses upon request? Ours doesn't on a regular basis, but you can phone up and ask for, for instance, a load of garden waste to be collected.
The only thing that I can think of re the wildlife getting into your collecting containers is
a) rinse the cider bottles (also annoying, I know, our drainer always has OH's lager cans on it)

b) invest in lidded dustbins to collect stuff in in the garden, and then transfer said stuff to something else to go into the car. Off the top of my head I'm thinking of a very big plastig bag such as the ones that are sold in Ikea, not necessarily recycled plastic but you will be reusing it.

I just think that having made such an effort, you'll ended up feeling miserable and guilty if you give up your efforts entirely!

Confused_Jo

The whole basis of this is to reduce first. Can you get the things you buy in plastic tubs, in bags that you can reuse? Ecoiver have lotsof refill points for their bottles.

Might be worth looking at supporting your locall mikman, though to be honest I don't as he delivers in the middle of the day and the milk would go off.
Lidl do range juice in glass bottles.
Buy fruit loose not in prepackaged stuff?
I bought dustbins for a fiver from wilkinsons and stick the squashed stuff in there for a trip once a month. you'd be surprised how much it 'll go down when squashed.
Stick the cardboard in your compost bin, works a treat and stops it getting too mushy. or maybe someone with allotments would want your green waste for their compost bin. try free cycle or allotments4all.co.uk.

Plus IMHO the Daily Mail love winding people up about this sort of thing. Stick to your gut feeling, you are doing the right thing.

fannyadams

Well done for recycling, keep it up! Every little helps...

Why not write to your council and tell them instead of whinging on here.
the more of us who tell our councillors what we think the more they *might* do something abou it!
I don't have kerbside recycling and my house resembles steptoes yard.
It's a 15 minute WALK to the recycling centre at the back of the pub and when I get there the bins are often full so I have to walk back with the recycling.
We keep ours inside the utility room but our bins are always full and smelly. but I see it as a small price to pay for preserving the planet and it's against my religion to hurt anything/one.

On the filthy car note: You can get some car seat covers in LIDL or ALDI I forget which. we have a waterproof one I got off the market for a few pounds and it has more than paid for itself - two dogs, two kids and a motorcycling habit...

zorber

Yes but after religiously recycling for a few years now, i read a report in the paper and on the news last week that as it is not cost effective to recycle alot of the waste we collect ir pop bottles. Our great councils and goverment just ship it all abroad in containers to places like china, where it then gets landfilled, so why do we waste our time and effort. Also having 2 or 3 lorrys doing the same trip as 1 used to to collect all our various wastes, surely we are just adding the the environmental problem with more carbon emmisions.

Murtle

My council doesn't enforce recycling facilities for flats....so it's down to the residents committee....guess what they said.....I now live in a permanent state of piles of things for recycling. Added to which, when the council started recycling for all the houses, they have removed all our communal bins!! The management company couldn't understand why I didn't use the communal bins, so I had to explain to her.....we don't have any, she doesn't live in the same area.....grrrr resident committees and the council!!!!

I have reduced my intake of crap down, it's just getting it somewhere useful now....

I fully empathise!!!

M
xx

JennyB

Zorber - that is exactly my thinking right now, I just wonder whether it is all really worth the effort in the end if after driving my recycling up to the tip they then ship some of it at great cost to the far east and pollute the environment over there! :mad:

Thanks all for the great tips so far - it's giving me plenty of food for thought.

I thought of a funny anecdote to demonstrate my previous commitment to recycling - I actually recycle on holiday! I have int he past separated my rubbish in my hotel room and on a previous tip even collected it up in hotel laundry bags and took it to the local recycling centre!! Now that's commitment people! :rotfl: