Rubbish!!!

betterlatethannever

not sure if this is the correct place to post this but i'm sure it will be moved if so.
I read today that the government wants to charge households who use more than one bin bag a week.
I recently decided that i need to reduce the amount of waste we produce. Two adults and FIVE bags a week:eek: so with a little effort and lots of recycling we have got it down to 2 bags a week.:T
We don't have the recycling bins here, just a box for cans/bottles etc and a bag for papers. I live a long way from my recycling center and i don't drive.
Is two bags a week good? how can i get it down further? how many bags do others use?

scheming_gypsy

i usually fill a wheelie bin every fortnight, thats just me and the lodger but he goes out at about 6am and comes back after 8pm.

Rupa

I use a bit less than one bin bag every week, for myself and two children. But I recycle a lot - once a fortnight I do a bin liner of plastics (milk cartons etc) and tins and a bin liner of paper and cardboard. Most of the glass jars I am saving for the PTA to use for the Tombola. I notice you don't recycle plastics, if you could do that it would minimise the bulky stuff.

Olliebeak

We're quite lucky here in Knowsley (Liverpool area). We get as many recycling boxes (for paper/aluminium/glass) and as many garden waste bins as we need. These are collected fortnightly at the kerbside. Also collected are plastic bottles left out in plastic bags. Cardboard goes in with the garden waste. At the moment our authority doesn't accept tetrapaks so I use those on my kitchen worktop to put my daily bits of rubbish in - they get stuffed tight before putting into the black binbag. My kitchen area isn't big enough to have my fliptop bin inside (kept outside by the waterbutt).

For the last two weeks I've managed to only have 1 black bin bag of rubbish in my 'normal' wheelie bin. Each fortnight my recycling box is full (I have another one in case of overflow at Christmas time!).

But we are very fortunate as we don't have a car so would not be able to recycle if it weren't for the kerbside scheme.

We can also get compost bins for £8.00 to keep in the garden. These have open bases and can take all your uncooked kitchen waste, garden waste, cardboard. Apparently, because the base is open, it means that worms can enter the compost and do their job of breaking everything down while it's rotting - and hey presto wonderful garden compost as organic as you choose it to be!

Good luck with your recycling - it becomes VERY addictive! I'm now ripping polythene windows off envelopes and the sticky bits (neither of those are welcome with the paper apparently) in order to recycle more paper. Toilet roll tubes/kitchen roll tubes also make it into the cardboard bin.

Check here for more recycling advice:

http://www.recyclenow.com/

doddsy

We don't quite fill a wheelie bin in a month, but that's because we are lucky with our recycling here - we recycle the following:

Paper/mags/junk mail - collected fortnightly
Steel & aluminium cans - collected fortnightly
glass - collected fortnightly - green box
garden & kitchen waste and cardboard - in green wheelie collected fortnightly.
food grade plastic bottles etc - just up the road in a bin
tetrapak cartons (milk & juice) - just up the road in a bin
batteries - recycled at the local bookshop
aluminium foil & milk bottle tops - recycled at the local bookshop
Clothes and scrap clothing - just up the road in a bin

We also have compost bins and a wormery.
Milk bottles returned to the milkman

Can't think of anything else.

btw the garden and kitchen waste - together with all cardboard - gets taken to a giant anaerobic digester and it all gets made into a type of compost that gets spread on agricultural land - apparently it smells like nothing on earth:rotfl:

betterlatethannever

I do recycle some plastics. The milk containers get put in the recycle box along with empty squash bottles. I need to find a leaflet on what can and can't be put in there.
Can i do the composting when i only have a small concreted over back yard? the compost would be no good to me though as no soil around apart from a couple of pots.
I'm going to make a real concerted effort this week to get down to one bin bag.

Olliebeak

If you contact your local authority environmental department they should have some information for you on what you can/can't recycle in your area.

Try the following link and put in your own postcode to search - you may find information on there;

http://www.recyclenow.com/

evilwitch

We don't quite fill a wheelie bin per month. Me, H and 2 kids, one of who is in disposable nappies (have got the re-useables but we lapsed and never got back to them)

We recycle paper and card and plastics (collected) and glass (walked round to the recycling bin). Have a compost bin.

Amazes me that the couple with a toddler next door manage to fill their wheelie bin to overflowing every week. They must throw out absolutely everything!

Softstuff

It's great that recycling is becoming more common, but there's another step you can take too, and that's to eliminate waste at the source. So this means buying products that have less packaging or buying from places you can reuse your own.

I'm sure the green board will be able to say more on that, I've just been reading a book recently that has me hot on the subject. Recycling still uses a lot of energy and resources, but using less in the first place really is the key.

betterlatethannever

Thanks for all that.
Another reason for asking is that the local council provides two bin bags a week and me being (or trying to be ) very money saving, i'm trying to avoid having to buy bin bags.
I'm trying to eliminate packaging at source by buying products from the greengrocer and butcher so non of them trays etc to bin.

Elliesmum

We fill a grey wheelie bin once a month and we fill 2 recycling wheelie bins in less than 3 weeks. I recycle every thing I can get away with. I save most packaging that can be junk modelled for my daughters school as they are always crying out for stuff like that.

We have a seperate box for glass and that's about it - oh and I compost, which is a laugh really as I don't have a garden to put the stuff on!!! Only started it last year so next year I'll dig it through properly and then give it away on freecycle.

Oh yes anything that can be taken to the charity shop or freecycled is.............. including old rags as charity shops can still make money on these.

We are a family of 2 adults and 1 child (with no. 2 on the way). I think the reason why we keep our rubbish down is by cooking from scratch etc and reusing the packaging as much as I can.

Yes I also save envelopes for scrap note pads, take them to college for the students to scribble on! They all think I'm raving mad - who cares!!!

EM xx