A constant bone of contention between my wife and myself.

It drives me mad that my other half washes every piece of recycling before sending it off on its merry way [in some cases all the way to China but that's another thread!]

Now me, if I have a bottle of beer or wine then it goes straight in the recycling tub, dregs and all, as I think using hot water to wash them is a waste of precious energy and arguably water.

The other side of the argument is the hygiene one, but then we don't wash our unrecyclable waste do we? why should we wash plastic and glass bottles?

Mine go in the washing up water when all else is done so no extra cost/effort

Plus it stops the inside bin smelling while i wait for the recycling to go out once a day

Tend to wash tins (especially tuna ones . yuk yuk yuk), and glass jars with sauces. Beer / wine bottles jsut get thrown in. Am not sure why, isn't down to quantity, sadly, as now am def middle aged, the amount of glass jars for coffee / sauces are far more than the amount of beer / wine. Sigh.

[quote]correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the whole country been forced to have different coloured bins which get emptied every couple of weeks???[/quote]

... depends on where you live in the UK.
Here in Leeds you get a large green bin for paper, tins and plastics.
A brown bin for garden waste.
A black bin for any 'real' rubbish.
Glass, 'tetrapak' juice cartons, battery and old clothes need to go communal collection points.

The green bin contents has to be separated by hand by some poor sod at a conveyor belt somewhere .

So, YES - please do wash your recycled waste jars and tins and milk containers - IF your waste is not presorted into separate bins at source - usually your Council will tell you somewhere if they want this to happen....

Colour codes do seem to vary. Here we have purple sacks (or big grey bins) for normal (landfill) rubbish, green boxes for paper and black boxes for certain plastic items and for metal cans.

Green and black boxes are collected alternate weeks.

I've never seen a blue bin.

Perhaps I should have been a bit clearer. When I said 'blue bins', I had a feeling they could be any colour in any district. My point is, if you have a bin which has a sticker on the top of it saying 'recycled waste' and giving a list of items you can put in it, you SHOULDN'T just chuck in a carrier bag of dirty nappies and banana skins.

All these idiots insisting on the right to smelly rubbish - it's obsolete in this household. No meat for a start, all veg out to compost daily, clean paper in one box, cardboard flattened in another for council composting, glass and tins cold rinsed, plastic tubs and loo roll tubes kept for next years seedlings, the only thing in the black bag nowadays is plastic packaging. So fortnightly collection's no problem and the rats have lost interest. This is after all Devon, in fact Teignbridge - 45% recycled in 2005-6 and rising - would be 60% if everyone cooperated - and still potential additional recycling streams like sorted plastic and milk cartons.

Posted By: luditeIf I actually believed that my recylable waste was being recycled I'd be far more proactive.

What makes you think it doesn't get recycled? Paper pulp is expensive stuff these days; metal prices are through the roof; lots of uses for mxed cullet coming on (ie broken glass) and energy costs hit glass prices hard; plastics are getting costly and plastic recycling technologies are coming on in leaps and bounds. The wonder is that any council could be disorganised enough to not recycle things.
Round here (Pembs) the council have just started giving out orange binbags for recycling everything except glass - paper, card, all plastics, metals etc. Two weeks ago, at the bottom of our track - maybe 15 black bags (from about seven households). This week, about 13 orange ones and two black ones. Not bad for the first week...

Posted By: luditeIf I actually believed that my recylable waste was being recycled

shouldn't be difficult to check - the council's website for a start.

Quite agree with the supermarket packaging argument agu, though they claim that having current packaging levels reduces food waste...

Did anyone catch the news this morning - the Tories are proposing that local authorities should pay householders for their recycling! This would be at no extra cost to the council tax payer as they currently have to pay for landfill, so as landfill reduced, so funds available to pay for recycling would increase.

An interesting idea I think - can you imagine people stealing your rubbish so that they could get the money - wouldn't the streets be clean!

Mike,

Glad to see that our household is not the only one that has this debate.

J

Posted By: luditeLoved the tory idea. I'm sure you've seen homeless people in New York pushing shopping trolleys of empty cans - that's why!

No, it's because the cans have a 5c or 10c deposit on them (as they do here in Quebec too - as do most plastic bottles).

Where I live, we have two rubbish collections per week as well as one recycling. This is changing soon with one of the rubbish collections being replaced by a compost collection. Garden waste is also collected once a week outside of winter. Anything can be put in the recycling except polystyrene foam and it doesn't have to be sorted. Everything does get recycled as the plant is local to the island of Montreal (and there was an interesting TV documentary that showed what happened to the metals, cardboard, paper, plastics and glass). The compost facility on the island generates electricity from the methane produced and free compost is handed out twice a year to anyone who wants it. The sewage works also produces methane and power from the "sludge" and uses some of the power produced to run the plant and the pumps required (though it doesn't make 100% of the power needed).

By the way, I only give some things a cursory rinse as they get washed in the recycling plant anyway (from what I saw in the documentary at least). At least the cats do a good job on leaving their tins clean

Paul in Montreal.

Posted By: Paul in Montreal
By the way, I only give some things a cursory rinse as they get washed in the recycling plant anyway (from what I saw in the documentary at least).
Paul in Montreal.

That is my assumption too. Either they get washed or heated to an extermely high tenperature at the beginning of their new life.

No I'm not convinced either Greenman, not saying no packaging but some of the things you buy are covered in it, plastic box, seperate plastic containers inside, wrapped in a sleeve etc etc. I don't understand why the government don't do more to force them to reduce packaging?

One I heard recently - a supermarket (which shall remain nameless) wraps a plastic sleeve around some of it's vegetables, and prints the sel-by date on it. In transit or subsequent handling, the sleeve sometimes slips off, and because they can't then guarantee it's not past its sell-by date, they have to bin it!

I really shouldn't get started on this subject (too late), but between supermarkets and globalisation, it's a wonder I ever get off my soap box! Were we really so much worse off when everything was sold in paper bags?