Sick of recycling - should I stop?

JennyB

ts_aly2000 - really, you must be talking about my council! The local paper ran a story a little while ago about our precious, carefully collected, saved and washed and squashed and sorted recycling being tipped into landfill sites... and we have the badly timed traffic lights! :eek: :mad: :eek:

circuit

zorber wrote:

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.

this is an urban myth.

people like to use the china/indonesia excuse as a reason to be lazy.

a friend of mine is a local councillor. waste collection, recycling, flytipping etc is his dept. i put 'the myth' to him and he explained, in detail, where our rubbish goes. he actually went to the local recycling plant to oversee the process - and said it's not only extremely efficient, but also amazingly detailed and thorough.

some of the waste goes to china at the end of the process - especially paper, which is used for low-quality recycled paper for comic books etc. this is because china has a shortage of paper and recyclable material. not because we are dumping it in a tip over there.

in our area, the council collects green bins twice a month. we find we throw out 2-3 times more recyclables than landfill waste. imagine all the space we are saving in landfills if we all do that. unless the bin man sees that the bin is contaminated (e.g. with garden waste), it goes to the plant.

maybe we are lucky. regarless, it's your responsibility to chase the council and demand more frequent collections.

Poppycat

I must admit although I recycle junk mail/shredded paper/mags (don't get papers) I soon accrue a lot in a week or two. I have very little room for stuff like this, no cupboard under stairs, no spare rooms, no recycle bins, council don't recycle in my area only the affluent areas mostly. So I have to tread to other side on the supermarket car park where is now convienant for all those shoppers but less convianant for us on foot so I tend to have to save it slightly longer than I use to since Sainsburys decided there recycling area would be better suited for a few minutes a day for there lorry drivers to park and have there packup (not for unloading).

Our councils policy in recycling is terrible

freeloader

JennyB wrote:

Sick of recycling - should I stop?

No, please don't stop, it really is worthwhile. Don't believe everything you read in the Daily Mail - they always put a certain spin on issues of this nature. (Mind you, now they've got a new pin-up in the shape of David "right-on" Cameron, they may change their tune).
Assuming you've already exhausted step 1 (reduce) and step 2 (reuse) possibilities:
Cardboard: compost it - I'm always amazed at how quickly it breaks down in my compost bin (the worms seem to love to eat it, nest in it and multiply in it ... who knows why... ).
Plastics - stamp on them first (but first catch slugs in cider bottle dregs .... when nicely drowned, incorporate into compost, rinse bottles, THEN stamp on them), then keep them in an IKEA bag or similar in the car boot so that you can unload them when you go to the supermarket.
Cans - ditto (especially beer & sweet drinks cans)

Dora_the_Explorer_5

I used to have a front porch. Now I have an intermedieate waste recycling facility - and this is civilisation :mad: .

I saw someone in a supermarket the other day decant all their shopping from it's wrapping, shove the wrapping into the trolley and leave it there for the **** supermarket to deal with :T

Altarf

circuit wrote:

this is an urban myth.

Of course it is.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/waste/story/0,,1308278,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2091-1302638,00.html

Contains_Mild_Peril

circuit wrote:

this is an urban myth.

people like to use the china/indonesia excuse as a reason to be lazy.

Not entirely. Plastics in particular are often shipped abroad for recycling because we don't have the facilities over here to deal with such quantities. They do get used though: only a small proportion of exported plastic is dumped unprocessed, and that's normally because it's contaminated with other wate. Other materials such as glass tend to be recycled more locally.
The current TV advertising campaign really annoys me. In most areas, the facilities just aren't there, and driving long distances just to get to recycling points is likely to do the environment more harm than good. The ads probably cost the government a lot of money, which would have been better spent expanding collections of recyclable waste.
Houses in my area now get little blue bins for paper, but we flat-dwellers who have big communal bins for the whole block don't get any paper bins. There are no collection points for plastic nearby, though supermarkets have bottle and can banks, and charity shop clothing and book banks, though I normally take these items directly to the charity shops. I have no garden for compost, but I'm planning to buy a paper shredder to "recycle" junk mail in my son's gerbil's cage.

JennyB

Altarf - great articles, I was looking for some earlier but had less luck.

I'm going to try quizzing my local council on what happens to the collected recycling material in this area. I'm so unconvinced by the practice of shipping it to China that if that's where I find out it's ending up I'm going to start throwing all of mine in the bin!

freeloader

1. Reduce
2. Reuse
3. Then, and only then, recycle

(incidentally, does anyone know the relative carbon (etc) emissions for shipping to 'China' and China making their own plastics from scratch?)

also, just noticed those guardian and times links are 2 years old - can anyone come up with more recent (credible) articles?

Altarf

Contains_Mild_Peril wrote:

Plastics in particular are often shipped abroad for recycling because we don't have the facilities over here

I think that the issue is that they don't have the facilities in China either. They just have a lot of 'disposable' labour and no health and safety rules to get in the way.

If we produce the rubbish, we should deal with it. We should either build plants to fully process it or dump it in the ground. We should not export the problem.

The only reason we can do this is freight rates to the far east are so cheap. Most of the shipping lines circumnavigate the globe in both directions. Although there is a lot of freight heading from the far east to the west (or the far east to America), for the boats heading the opposite direction there is much less demand. Hence it is cheap to export our problem.

JennyB wrote:

I'm going to try quizzing my local council on what happens to the collected recycling material in this area. I'm so unconvinced by the practice of shipping it to China that if that's where I find out it's ending up I'm going to start throwing all of mine in the bin!

I suspect that they will insert a 'deniable' company into the chain so they can just say that they supply it to XYZ Ltd in the UK. However just send them a Freedom of Information Request asking the geographic destination of the waste (if you ask for company details they will probably refuse as commercially sensitive).