About to change from weekly to fortnightly collections-any pointers?

Spendless

Our town is gradually changing from a weekly collection to a fortnightly one. My village changes next month.

We have had a green box for years, which I use every week and is usually full. Paper, tin foil, clothes, paired shoes, tins and glass can go in this. My childrens school does a 'rags r us' collection several times a year that takes clothes, shoes, belts and bags. I use this too as it raises money for school.

All my veg peelings, except potato and onion go to next doors rabbits. I have a lawn but no garden (soil) so don't think a composter would be of any use

Cardboard and plastic are not currently collected, but as the fortnightly change happens you get a green bin to put cardboard and garden waste in. You can take plastic bottles to the recycling centre a few miles away, so was going to put all bottles to one side and take them.

I've identified that I'm using kitchen roll too often and am going to change to j-cloths that I'll wash. I've gone back to using butter instead of marg so no empty dishes gathering up.

I'm just looking for things I've perhaps overlooked or ideas I hadn't considered to further cut down.

Any help appreciated.

Smiley_Mum

Any magazines that you may buy and have finished with you could pass onto local Dental/Doctors Surgeries etc for their waiting rooms.

Rechargeable batteries instead of throwaway ones.

Borrow or rent items you don't use often.

BungleGirl

If your council is anything like ours they don't let you put plastic carrier bags in the recycling bin - ours is a blue bin - apparently they jam up the machine that processes the contents. So for us this means accepting as few carrier bags as possible and a trip to the dreaded tesco to take any left over carrier bags. You may be able to put your potatoe peelings and onion skins in your green bin but that depends on your councils specifics.

In the summer we have the occasional problem with maggots in our black (landfill bin), this is generally due to kitchen food waste - the only way I can think of to overcome this is with a wormery - I'm sure that someone else can advise better on that though.

Good luck - at least we have councils that are promoting recycling - many others don't!

Smiley_Mum

Ours does promote recycling. Unfortunately, we have yet to receive any recycling bins, but crazy as it may seem, the houses across the road did get recycling bins etc, whereas our side didn't. Still waiting...

Justie

Rinsing out plastic trays from meat etc before they go in the bin will help keep smells etc at bay. If you can bag kitchen food waste or at least make sure that bin bags aren't split then that will help too. The usual things of freecycle what you can, reuse what you can, and recycle what you can all help. We've found that the increase in what our council took for recycling meant that our bin was never full (it'd take us more than a month to fill it where as our recycling boxes are usually jammed). Try to have 2 bins in the bathroom and bedrooms etc as well as things like toilet rolls can be recycled and I find that lots of things come in packaging and if I have a recycling bin in the bedroom too then it gets separated whereas if I just have the one bin it all would go in the rubbish.

Check with your council if you can get another recycling box or a larger bin (they may charge you but it's worth it).

Charis

Strange how each council collects different things to reprocess. Ours collects the plastic bottles (but not brown, not empty food containers, not the indestructible plastic shells which electrical goods are packed in). It charges 60p per bag for collecting garden waste, which they admit goes straight to landfill :mad: whilst if you take it in your car to the tip the green rubbish is processed and sold as "soil improver" (complete with dandelion seeds?) The neighbouring council subsidises the purchase of waste disposal units to fit in your sink. That solves the problem of the growing rat population (did you know there are more rats than people in the UK?) tearing holes in your bag as the waste food festers in the height of summer whilst waiting for its by-weekly collection. I wonder what we are supposed to do with the packaging with which large appliances are surrounded ? Huge chunks of expanded polystyrene and corrugated cardboard boxes? Maybe we will have to insist in future that the delivery men unwrap the goods and take the packaging back with them. Bet that will cost us.:(

Ken68

Hi Spendless...Wash cans for definate, and as mentioned no residues of meat, raw or cooked. Wrap kitchen waste in newspapers.
I treat sardine cans with used once kitchen towel to soak off the grease, then a dab of w.U.L. Keep a long handled thin brush to help clean the cans.
Mine are blue bins collected every two weeks, and unless everything is washed, whiffs a bit. A cardboard box with a newspaper in the bottom helps keep the bin clean.

phizzimum

I always cut the top off empty tetra pak cartons (by that I mean the sort plasticky coated ones that fruit juice come in) and fill them up with any small pieces of rubbish I have. Otherwise they take up a lot of room in your bin if thrown away empty.

dalumsden1

In my house crushing bottles has become second nature now. I work in a hospital and sometimes pop some of my domestic waste into the hospital skip. It all goes the same place.

maryb

I think a wheelie bin is essential if you want to keep rats at bay if you only have a fortnightly collection. Our council will empty them but doesn't encourage them so people put out black bags full of waste which the foxes and rats rip to shreds. I have seen so many more rats since we switched to fortnightly collections. I've had to give up feeding birds since i saw a rat munching contentedly on the bird table less than two feet from the kitchen window eeeeuuwww!

brindles01

My local authority are still on weekly collections and I can say that since I have religiously stuck to sifting out all paper-based rubbish and used the green 'garden' bin, that my rubbish bin is now only half full most weeks (mainly plastics! of every variety) so a fortnightly collection would not impair my quality of life too much.