>household refuse; food waste; paper; plastics and tins; glass; cardboard; household batteries; textiles; small electrical items; and green waste bags.
Given they collect several types of item most councils leave it to you to dispose of properly like batteries, clothes, glass and electrical items, I feel like having a lot of bins is a fair compromise.
Important_Material92 on
It seems crazy to me that, instead of spending the necessary amounts on sorting and processing technology, that we have put all the onus for recycling on the households.
Wouldn’t it be great if we created an organisation that we all contribute to that could undertake tasks like this on behalf of us which would be more efficient and less burdensome? We could call it, a local council.
Beginning_Monitor694 on
Would require investing in a lot more collection. Never going to happen.
Jackster22 on
Some European countries have community bins for extra things like this.
You have your own general waste but recycling is done in these subsurface bins (the bin sits on the massive underground container) and they come to collect them when they are full with a special truck.
Great for the inner city and subs.
padestel on
Hey now. I thought Sunak had made more than 7 bins illegal?
313378008135 on
Sorting and sifting is done mostly automatically in a MRF (materials recovery facility) nowadays. Its all lasers, magnets, compressed air, conveyers. Its magic to watch.
Having householders have many bins and doing the sorting and sifting themselves saves the council money as they don’t need to use a MRF any more and pass the task to householders at the expense of your space at home and your time.
Its cost cutting in the guise of being green. They can and do literally do this themselves already
_HGCenty on
Also, people are going to make mistakes whether it’s residents putting stuff in the wrong bin and the binmen throwing the wrong thing in the wrong part of the lorry.
Having all these bins just increases the chance of something like this happening and it all having to be sorted regardless.
XenorVernix on
My council is stupid enough to charge extra for garden waste collection. People just put the waste in the general waste bin if it’s a small amount.
nettie_r on
I live in an area where we have 6 bins (trollibocs system plus garden waste and black bin) and the council also provide (optional) bags for stuff like clothing and electronics (which goes to a local charity) and a small bag for used batteries/vapes.
If you’ve only got 2 bins I can understand why it might seem daunting but it is honestly fine. It’s really not that onerous. Sort as you go. People losing their mind over bins is so bizarre. I saw someone literally describe it as ‘woke bins’ the other day. Like, what😅
The main issue is even the bin men don’t seem to understand which box the loo rolls go in🙈
Negative_Equity on
Currently I’ve got a box for plastic and cans, a box for glass, a bag for cardboard and a food waste caddy and a green bin for garden waste (which I pay extra for). And a general bin.
It should be cans, paper, card and glass in one bin, food waste can stay in a caddy. The garden and normal waste could be another two bins. That would be far more manageable.
andrew0256 on
If we had one nationwide scheme we would end up with the NHS. Cheaper in big picture terms but inefficient at the local level. You would also have stupid prices for small details at one end of the scale and massive change nationally before it was needed as politicians satisfy their egos. As usual the middle ground is probably the way to go which would be consortia of councils working with the processing firms to streamline the system.
nicothrnoc on
When we visit Europe each village has multiple, communal sorting bins so instead of trying to fit multiple sorting bins into our tiny kitchen and 3 weeks worth of rubbish into a tiny wheelie bin and everybody’s overflowing rubbish constantly blowing around because the outdoor containers they gave us are open topped and people fly tip and burn their rubbish due to the collections and container sizes being so divorced from reality, people can just pop to the bins 100 yards away and dispose of the amount of rubbish they actually need to as they produce it. Result the village in Spain or france isn’t covered in litter like ours and nobody is having a sneaky rubbish-fire.
It’s not fucking rocket science.
TheRiddler1976 on
At work we have 6 different bins.
I still never know which one to put stuff in, even though there’s a helpful list of examples
Zaphod424 on
Where I live we have 4 bins, for very distinct things. One for food waste, one for refuse, one for garden waste (which you have to pay extra for) and *one for recycling*. And everything recyclable goes in that one bin, plastic, paper, cardboard, glass, all of it.
Having grown up with this system, when I went to uni I just put glass in the recycling bin, not realising that not everywhere worked like that. I only realised halfway through my 2nd year when one of my housemates pointed it out. Where I went to uni they didn’t even collect glass, you had to take it to the recycling bank, which is a pain as a student without a car, so we rarely did it.
The reality is if you want pople to recycle you have to make it easy, not a massive chore. If you do make it a pain, people just won’t do it. Requiring people to sort their recycling is a pain, even worse is to not collect certain things and require they be taken to a recycling bank.
GreenValeGarden on
To be fair, the entire recycling approach is stupid beyond belief. How much is dumped in another country or just secretly burnt?
It would be nice to have some adults enter Government and sort out this mess. My suggestions:
1) setup a design approach and legislate if necessary to reduce the amount of packaging in new materials. For example, use of more paper and wax paper instead of plastic, stop mixing materials such as plastic and cardboard glued together on food packaging, remove having manuals in electronics covered in plastic, get rid of polystyrene and use flexible cardboard for product wrapping, stop supermarkets wrapping their deliveries in layers of cling film during transport
2) fine or ban companies from selling products with no simple mechanism to recycle.
3) add the cost of recycling into the original cost of the product and put the money into a fund for future use
4) enforce right to repair and spare parts
5) rebuild an economy on products that don’t require repurchasing every for years
And probably many more simpler ideas than having 10 bins when people don’t know now what they can put in the green bin
jameswgdyer on
Until recently my parents were able to put food waste in their green garden waste bin, it was then processed into bio-fuel. The council have now changed the rules so that they can no longer do this, so food waste is now back into general waste.
Far from making progress, the recycling scheme has gone backwards.
calvincosmos on
Still think that me recycling properly my entire life won’t offset a a couple of planes in the sky, but sure I’ll continue to, wasting plenty of time deconstructing packaging and putting it in the right bins, while actual Earth polluters are left to contaminate willy nilly
NeverGonnaGiveMewUp on
Must be one of the lucky ones. We have recycling, garden and general waste.
Although they do now charge for garden waste which is new. Annoyingly and unsurprisingly a lot of people didn’t take them up on that offer and now there are lots of fires and flytipping.
Far-Crow-7195 on
Most households aren’t lucky enough to have anywhere to store 10 bins without their front garden becoming purely a bin store. It’s nonsense.
king_duck on
I don’t really get what is meant by recycling “more”.
I think they really mean “sort more”.
We have 3 bins. A black general waste bin, a brown recycling bin and a green food and garden waste bin.
The brown waste takes metal, paper and plastic; is I presume is sorted elsewhere. By volume the brown bin is my most used bin.
Have all of the recycling together in the brown bin is actually very good… it lowers the burden to recycle. I personally don’t mind recycling and spending some effort doing it. But by partner is happy to do it but only if it’s low burden.
The only way they’ll get people to do this is by making the general waste bin smaller and smaller and smaller. But then you’re just pissing people off.
Jammybe on
I only was recently told that the likes of Dominos pizza boxes shouldn’t go in the recycling bin due to the left over food/grease on them.
Is that true ?
Aedaxeon on
This article (and comment section) seems completely oblivious to the relevant law change coming in on 31st March next year.
Which requires that all waste management companies across England (sadly not the whole UK) must accept the same recyclables (councils, workplaces, etc) and there must be a maximum of 4 council bins (rubbish, recycling, food waste, and garden waste), but garden waste can be an optional service.
Three councils in the country have ten “bins” available to its residents but the average number of bins collected per resident countrywide is 4, the figure includes bins from the following list (which by the way includes things like electricals, batteries, garden waste, and coffee pods, which are far from weekly collections for anyone).
* *general waste, dry mixed recycling, food waste, paper and card, garden waste, glass, plastics, batteries, textiles, waste electrical and electronic equipment and coffee pods*
28 Comments
>household refuse; food waste; paper; plastics and tins; glass; cardboard; household batteries; textiles; small electrical items; and green waste bags.
Given they collect several types of item most councils leave it to you to dispose of properly like batteries, clothes, glass and electrical items, I feel like having a lot of bins is a fair compromise.
It seems crazy to me that, instead of spending the necessary amounts on sorting and processing technology, that we have put all the onus for recycling on the households.
Wouldn’t it be great if we created an organisation that we all contribute to that could undertake tasks like this on behalf of us which would be more efficient and less burdensome? We could call it, a local council.
Would require investing in a lot more collection. Never going to happen.
Some European countries have community bins for extra things like this.
You have your own general waste but recycling is done in these subsurface bins (the bin sits on the massive underground container) and they come to collect them when they are full with a special truck.
Great for the inner city and subs.
Hey now. I thought Sunak had made more than 7 bins illegal?
Sorting and sifting is done mostly automatically in a MRF (materials recovery facility) nowadays. Its all lasers, magnets, compressed air, conveyers. Its magic to watch.
Having householders have many bins and doing the sorting and sifting themselves saves the council money as they don’t need to use a MRF any more and pass the task to householders at the expense of your space at home and your time.
Its cost cutting in the guise of being green. They can and do literally do this themselves already
Also, people are going to make mistakes whether it’s residents putting stuff in the wrong bin and the binmen throwing the wrong thing in the wrong part of the lorry.
Having all these bins just increases the chance of something like this happening and it all having to be sorted regardless.
My council is stupid enough to charge extra for garden waste collection. People just put the waste in the general waste bin if it’s a small amount.
I live in an area where we have 6 bins (trollibocs system plus garden waste and black bin) and the council also provide (optional) bags for stuff like clothing and electronics (which goes to a local charity) and a small bag for used batteries/vapes.
If you’ve only got 2 bins I can understand why it might seem daunting but it is honestly fine. It’s really not that onerous. Sort as you go. People losing their mind over bins is so bizarre. I saw someone literally describe it as ‘woke bins’ the other day. Like, what😅
The main issue is even the bin men don’t seem to understand which box the loo rolls go in🙈
Currently I’ve got a box for plastic and cans, a box for glass, a bag for cardboard and a food waste caddy and a green bin for garden waste (which I pay extra for). And a general bin.
It should be cans, paper, card and glass in one bin, food waste can stay in a caddy. The garden and normal waste could be another two bins. That would be far more manageable.
If we had one nationwide scheme we would end up with the NHS. Cheaper in big picture terms but inefficient at the local level. You would also have stupid prices for small details at one end of the scale and massive change nationally before it was needed as politicians satisfy their egos. As usual the middle ground is probably the way to go which would be consortia of councils working with the processing firms to streamline the system.
When we visit Europe each village has multiple, communal sorting bins so instead of trying to fit multiple sorting bins into our tiny kitchen and 3 weeks worth of rubbish into a tiny wheelie bin and everybody’s overflowing rubbish constantly blowing around because the outdoor containers they gave us are open topped and people fly tip and burn their rubbish due to the collections and container sizes being so divorced from reality, people can just pop to the bins 100 yards away and dispose of the amount of rubbish they actually need to as they produce it. Result the village in Spain or france isn’t covered in litter like ours and nobody is having a sneaky rubbish-fire.
It’s not fucking rocket science.
At work we have 6 different bins.
I still never know which one to put stuff in, even though there’s a helpful list of examples
Where I live we have 4 bins, for very distinct things. One for food waste, one for refuse, one for garden waste (which you have to pay extra for) and *one for recycling*. And everything recyclable goes in that one bin, plastic, paper, cardboard, glass, all of it.
Having grown up with this system, when I went to uni I just put glass in the recycling bin, not realising that not everywhere worked like that. I only realised halfway through my 2nd year when one of my housemates pointed it out. Where I went to uni they didn’t even collect glass, you had to take it to the recycling bank, which is a pain as a student without a car, so we rarely did it.
The reality is if you want pople to recycle you have to make it easy, not a massive chore. If you do make it a pain, people just won’t do it. Requiring people to sort their recycling is a pain, even worse is to not collect certain things and require they be taken to a recycling bank.
To be fair, the entire recycling approach is stupid beyond belief. How much is dumped in another country or just secretly burnt?
It would be nice to have some adults enter Government and sort out this mess. My suggestions:
1) setup a design approach and legislate if necessary to reduce the amount of packaging in new materials. For example, use of more paper and wax paper instead of plastic, stop mixing materials such as plastic and cardboard glued together on food packaging, remove having manuals in electronics covered in plastic, get rid of polystyrene and use flexible cardboard for product wrapping, stop supermarkets wrapping their deliveries in layers of cling film during transport
2) fine or ban companies from selling products with no simple mechanism to recycle.
3) add the cost of recycling into the original cost of the product and put the money into a fund for future use
4) enforce right to repair and spare parts
5) rebuild an economy on products that don’t require repurchasing every for years
And probably many more simpler ideas than having 10 bins when people don’t know now what they can put in the green bin
Until recently my parents were able to put food waste in their green garden waste bin, it was then processed into bio-fuel. The council have now changed the rules so that they can no longer do this, so food waste is now back into general waste.
Far from making progress, the recycling scheme has gone backwards.
Still think that me recycling properly my entire life won’t offset a a couple of planes in the sky, but sure I’ll continue to, wasting plenty of time deconstructing packaging and putting it in the right bins, while actual Earth polluters are left to contaminate willy nilly
Must be one of the lucky ones. We have recycling, garden and general waste.
Although they do now charge for garden waste which is new. Annoyingly and unsurprisingly a lot of people didn’t take them up on that offer and now there are lots of fires and flytipping.
Most households aren’t lucky enough to have anywhere to store 10 bins without their front garden becoming purely a bin store. It’s nonsense.
I don’t really get what is meant by recycling “more”.
I think they really mean “sort more”.
We have 3 bins. A black general waste bin, a brown recycling bin and a green food and garden waste bin.
The brown waste takes metal, paper and plastic; is I presume is sorted elsewhere. By volume the brown bin is my most used bin.
Have all of the recycling together in the brown bin is actually very good… it lowers the burden to recycle. I personally don’t mind recycling and spending some effort doing it. But by partner is happy to do it but only if it’s low burden.
The only way they’ll get people to do this is by making the general waste bin smaller and smaller and smaller. But then you’re just pissing people off.
I only was recently told that the likes of Dominos pizza boxes shouldn’t go in the recycling bin due to the left over food/grease on them.
Is that true ?
This article (and comment section) seems completely oblivious to the relevant law change coming in on 31st March next year.
Which requires that all waste management companies across England (sadly not the whole UK) must accept the same recyclables (councils, workplaces, etc) and there must be a maximum of 4 council bins (rubbish, recycling, food waste, and garden waste), but garden waste can be an optional service.
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/consistency-in-household-and-business-recycling-in-england/outcome/government-response
I don’t get why one blue bin can’t be enough, and it gets sorted at recycling.
Hell… seemed ages ago, and it was sorted at collection by my company my council used. Giant cage type bin lorry.
Gardens have limited space, some houses don’t even have that. Why do we have to turn recycling into the most convoluted way?
Councils can’t even have a standard way. Mine stopped taking plastic.
In Sweden we have multiple bins (they’re small and we keep ours under the sink) at home for say, food, glass, metal cartons, plastic and general crap.
We have 2 wheelie bins that have different sections for the different materials.
We have public recycling places and the dump has skips for different materials.
It’s not that difficult, just takes a bit of getting used to.
Why don’t we legislate against plastic packaging instead?
They could just have like mega bins at the end of each road but you can guarantee some smack rat will lob a whole couch in the wrong bin
Honestly if this is what it takes to give me more bin space I’m all for jt
>The research, by the TaxPayers’ Alliance pressure group
[Mhmm…](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/who-funds-you/taxpayers-alliance/)
Three councils in the country have ten “bins” available to its residents but the average number of bins collected per resident countrywide is 4, the figure includes bins from the following list (which by the way includes things like electricals, batteries, garden waste, and coffee pods, which are far from weekly collections for anyone).
* *general waste, dry mixed recycling, food waste, paper and card, garden waste, glass, plastics, batteries, textiles, waste electrical and electronic equipment and coffee pods*