This recycling bandwagon bugs me. I live in the city and the house next door is in the county I can (and do) recycle paper, plastic and glass. Next door can also do cans but we can't. There are 4 colection wagons that come down our street. Why can't there be a consistent country wide policy so everyone can recycle the same things? You can't tell me the two (actually more as next door put out diferent things on different weeks) trucks can't go to the same place to dump their loads...

Which is why I said there should be LGA guidance to authorities on a "best practice" recycling policy. The vast difference in what each authority will recycle is absurd.

We have had fines for years here - and at my last flat, the landlord was always putting up notices that we had to better sort the rubbish.

As well as fines, we get charged for all the waste that gets collected. We pay more for the "Restmull" (general waste) per kilo than we do for correctly sorted waste.

We have bins for plastic, paper, general and bio. Electrical items have to be taken to the tip. Building materials (bricks, paint, tiles, metal etc.) aren't allowed into the general waste. You either have to arrange for it to be collected or take it to the tip (and you have to pay for it - and you have to separated bricks/cement/tiles etc. from wood and metail, all of which are weighed separately).

"Spermull" - large items, like sofas, cookers, tables, beds etc. will be collected for free, but you have to put them outside on the day arranged.

Our communal recycling bins have not been emptied for a while. That is because some twat has dumped some plastic bottles in the drinks can/aerosol bin and a month or two ago, I found a box of metal coat hangers in the paper recycling bin. We cannot recycle plastic or cardboard.

This week we got a flyer from the council about what can be recycled, half of it doesn't apply to the flats where I live.

We have only just in the last five years got a recycle bin back home, a little thing that carries about two bucketfuls.

For the last fifteen years or so, we have taken half an hour out of our weekend to go ten minutes up the road to the local waste centre, and put all of our weeks worth of plastic, glass, paper, etc. in the recycling bins.
I can't see why others can't do this, it takes less than an hour, one day a week...

House to house collection of recycling is preferred, but where they don't do that, is it really too much trouble to take your recycling to the super market to put in the bins there, or to a recycling centre?