Grr... recycling!

Krisp_3

Hi! I've been a member for AGES, but not posted much before.

Anyway, I need to get this off my chest and also see if anyone else has been in the same boat!

We're (hopefully) moving house soon and have realised how much 'stuff' we have accumulated in the past few years. For reasons too long and irrelevant, we have old computers, scanners, printers which we wanted to firstly donate to charity. You would NOT believe how much time/leg-work we have invested trying to pass them on to local/national charities. It appears that anything over about 2 years old isn't worth considering. Fair enough. (Although one comment we got was that we can't go 'dumping' our old stuff on African children, they want more modern equipment... hmm... has anyone asked them?).

So, onto recycling. If we were a business, the various recycling companies would have bitten our hand off. As we are only members of the public, they're not interested. Or they want to charge a fortune (and I mean a fortune) to take them off our hands.

Don;t get me wrong, I understand that there are costs attached to recycling things, but it really frustrates me that all this equipment is in perfect working order and no-one wants it.

So, we have to dump it (responsibly) with a firm who is clearing out the rest of our stuff that really isn't sellable, donatable etc.

I try really hard to be green, but I wish the government's green message actually had teeth! Ironically, our council will collect lrecyclable arge items for a small fee, but what we have to get rid of 'isn't large enough'.

Bah!

kaznelson

Have you thought of using

www. freecycle.org?

squashy

Freecycle next time?

Brooker_Dave

Krisp wrote: »

Hi! I've been a member for AGES, but not posted much before.

Anyway, I need to get this off my chest and also see if anyone else has been in the same boat!

We're (hopefully) moving house soon and have realised how much 'stuff' we have accumulated in the past few years. For reasons too long and irrelevant, we have old computers, scanners, printers which we wanted to firstly donate to charity. You would NOT believe how much time/leg-work we have invested trying to pass them on to local/national charities. It appears that anything over about 2 years old isn't worth considering. Fair enough. (Although one comment we got was that we can't go 'dumping' our old stuff on African children, they want more modern equipment... hmm... has anyone asked them?).

So, onto recycling. If we were a business, the various recycling companies would have bitten our hand off. As we are only members of the public, they're not interested. Or they want to charge a fortune (and I mean a fortune) to take them off our hands.

Don;t get me wrong, I understand that there are costs attached to recycling things, but it really frustrates me that all this equipment is in perfect working order and no-one wants it.

So, we have to dump it (responsibly) with a firm who is clearing out the rest of our stuff that really isn't sellable, donatable etc.

I try really hard to be green, but I wish the government's green message actually had teeth! Ironically, our council will collect lrecyclable arge items for a small fee, but what we have to get rid of 'isn't large enough'.

Bah!

Why not take it down the tip like everyone else does?

Are you lazy?

Pennywise

Krisp wrote: »

So, onto recycling. If we were a business, the various recycling companies would have bitten our hand off. As we are only members of the public, they're not interested. Or they want to charge a fortune (and I mean a fortune) to take them off our hands.

That sounds completely the opposite to our experience. We do have a small business, operated from domestic premises, and we just couldn't get anyone to take away anything closely related to business at all. The moment we said "business", the pound signs started chinging and we were given ridiculous quotes and expected to sign long term contracts for commercial waste removal - they wouldn't take recyclable items such as computers, desks, filing cabinets, etc. unless we signed up with them to take our non recyclable waste. Local council weren't interested at all - they said they had no recycling facilities for businesses and referred us to the trade waste companies who are the ones wanting a long term contract.

Anyway, so we moved "odd" items from the business part of the house to the residential part and then offered them one at a time to a scheme run by the local council - they snapped our hand off - they were more than happy to collect it all from a residential address!

We did the same with broken items, i.e. vdu screens, old printers, etc. Took them one at a time to the local council tip and the workers there took them all off to the relevant stores, presumably for recycling.

Just shows how different (and stupid) different local councils can be. In our experience, the moment they discover you are a business, they see the pound signs and charge exorbitant amounts of cash, presumably because they know your options are limited and they seem to have an inbuilt bias that all businesses must be millionaires.

Home_and_Garden

Hi

We have been told now that we have to be WEEE compliant.

So we have gone out and found a number of places that you can put your old stuff on for free. See the links on this page WEEE Information

We just moved to a bigger office and our Local Council tip in Rugby has been closed down, so to be green I thought I would be clever and put a load of rubbish we had at home and at my brother’s house in the van we used to move office so I did not have to make 6 car trips to the next town that has a tip.

We got to Coventry and were told they will not take vans! We were also told that vans have to be booked in 3 days before! Now if you were moving house, you would not think of ringing 3 days in advance to say that you had a load for the tip and will need to come and unload. When I asked where I could take it, I was simply told “I don’t know”. I could not be leave how unhelpful they were. I was very tempted to just dump everything on the road in the tip, I was that cross!

We drove onto the next town and were told “we do not take vans. Can you not read the sign? ‘No commercial waste’”. I argued with the man, who would not even look in the back of the van to see it was old garden toys, boxes and 2 Christmas trees.

I was getting very cross now, 2 hours and 3 towns down the line! I found that Daventry council has a proper recycling tip and they were happy to let me - they did not even ask if it was commercial waste, which it was not, which surprised me because the other tips just assumed that because the rubbish was in a van it must be business waste.

Moral of this story: make 6-7 trips in the car next time and leave a massive carbon foot print!!

Krisp_3

Thanks for your interesting replies, guys. We'll try Freecycle for anything else in the mean-time!

Brooker Dave - no, I'm not lazy. I don't drive as I have a condition which prevents me from doing so - otherwise I would, believe me!