[rant]
Bloody Derby city council, I've sent in a application form for a second brown bin as I have way too much garden waste for one. Now they've turned round and said they've decided to stop providing extra recycling bins. ????? Given all the government targets for recycling and the EU fines for using landfills, how on earth can they justify this. If they think they're bagging up my garden waste and driving across the city to the big recycling centre, they can think again. I don't grow vegetables, so have no need for a compost heap.
I'm debating whether just to put it in my normal black bin (probably not as they'll fine me), or whether to have a massive bonfire every so often (no fines for that).

Why are politicians and bureaucrat such idiots?
[/rant]

I've just complained to the council about the recycling situation in our area.

About five years ago, we started alternate collections: One week non-recyclables, one week recyclables. They supplied about half a dozen different bins, boxes, bags, which was all very confusing, not to mention the chaos on the roads on a windy dag with bags flying everywhere.

They've now replaced the whole lot with a single bin and we are allowed to order as many as necessary of these. The problem is that they are printing your name and house number on every bin to stop them being stolen. I don't want door-to-door salesmen knowing my name

Peter.

Yeah, cos it's really hard to find out in other ways...

My girlfriends parents live in Carmarthen, the council there brought in a recycling policy last year. After looking through the leaflets and getting all the bins and bags etc., they don't know what gets put into the normal bin anymore...They have bins/bags for paper/metal/plastic/food waste/green waste, there is very little after that to throw away...

I knew somebody would say that, but I think it's only natural to listen more to someone if they know your name.

Peter.

Here we have a similar situation to that of Peter. Alternate recyclable and non recyclable collections.

We don't have a garden waste container though. In our garden is a compost bin and all other garden stuff, grass cuttings, weeds etc, I have to drive to the local dump site where they do have garden waste skips.

It's very rare that we completely fill either wheelie bin and we've never had a problem with smells, vermin or anything that I constantly hear folk moaning about on tv and radio programs about waste collection.

I had some serious problems with maggots during last summer. They still scare me after finding them crawling in the house from the bin

All houses in our area currently have:

• Bins:
  
  • Green - For non-recylable waste
  • Brown - For garden waste
• Bags:
  
  • Light green - For newspapers and magazines
  • Dark green - For metal cans and tins
• Boxes:
  
  • Green - For glass bottles and jars
• Woven sacks:
  
  • Light green - For cardboard
  • Dark green - For plastic bottles

You can imagine what the streets look like on collection day!

Peter.

The system back home is:

Two bins:
- Black == General waste (Once every two weeks)
- Green == Anything that you would try to compost: Green waste, tea bags, vegetable off cuts, cardboard, etc (Once every two weeks)

One box:
- Black == Anything else recyclable: Clothes, glass, plastic, metal, paper, etc (Once every week)

It works well with no bags being left of the road side...However the box is far too small for the amount of recycling five people generate, so we hoard it in the shed then do a mass trip to the local recycling center once a month...

We have
Black wheelie bin - for on recysling waste
Brown wheelie bin - for garden waste
A roll of plastic bags - for (selected) plastic waste*
A woven plastic sack - for paper
Another woven plastic sack - for cardboard
A green plastic box - for glass and metal

* We can only recycle certain kinds of plastic. For example, milk bottles can be recycled, the plastic caps can’t (apparently).

Each kind of recycling goes out on different weeks. The containers which are reusable (green box, woven plastic bags) tend to get nicked from time to time. The road looks a mess, especially when it’s plastic bottles day as people just don’t fasten the end of their bags, and the contents blow out.

I bet it all ends up in land fill in China anyway.

Green bin - all non recyclable stuff. We always bag it first in black bin bags, tied at the top to stop aynthing falling out or crawling/flying in.

Blue bin - paper, cardboard, metals, some plastics (awkward as our council don't recycle certain types of plastic)

It works very well here.

well i live on the same premises as my village shop and post office that i own,its a fairly big place,third of an acre of land,4 bedrooms,a garage that fits 4 cars and of course my shop and post office are located in the same building.i also am married with 4 children,so you may have gathered that i have a lot of private and shop waste which i must say that at least 95% of the shop waste is cardboard.now i pay £178 every 6 months for 2 extra bins which are slightly larger that the standard wheelie bin.now these bins are green ones which are for non recyclable stuff and why green? because our local council would not give me blue ones (recyclable) we argued with them for sometime but they would not back down on the green ones,even though i was paying for them.i cant remember what his excuse was for not providing blue bins as it was some 3 years ago now but i like to do my bit for the enviroment and being as i knew that so much of it was very good cardboard which could go to some use,but thats the stubborn council for you.
you can pay for it but you get what your given and not what you want or need.
there was i write up in our local paper about a year ago that our council was stopping recycling altogether as it wasnt financailly viable and as everybody noticed that they use exactly the same lorry to collect standard waste one week and recycled waste the following.makes me wonder
cheers spunky

Lots of text there

One of my customers was a recycling company who did rounds where you had to seperate everything before you put it out.
The van would then come along and throw all of it into one van.
What's the point?

Grey bin :

Carrier bags
Yoghurt pots
Margarine tubs
Polystyrene
Plastic food trays
Crisp packets
Cling film
Greeting cards
Waxed cartons (orange juice, etc.)
Polystyrene egg boxes
Yellow pages - only during November and August as they can be recycled during September and October
Wallpaper
Envelopes
Shredded paper

Green :

Milk containers
Lemonade/Fizzy drink bottles
Cordial/squash bottles
Washing up liquid bottles
Detergent bottles
Fabric conditioner bottles
Washing liquid bottles
Cereal boxes
Tea bag boxes
Toilet roll tubes
Cardboard egg boxes
Corrugated cardboard
Newspapers
Magazines
Catalogues
Junk Mail
White Computer Paper
Other office paper
Telephone directories
Yellow Pages
Food tins (soup, baked beans, etc.)
Drink cans (with widgets are fine)
Foil dishes

Glass - can't be placed in the grey bin. Deal with it yourself.
Compostables - can't be places in the green bin. Deal with it yourself.

You'd imagine that we'd have a coherent national policy on this, really, wouldn't you?

I have the same problem. On alternate weeks, we have:

Green wheelie bin for compostable cardboard, shredded paper and garden waste
Black wheelie bin for non-recyclable rubbish
Black box for glass and paper
Green box for plastic bottles, tins cans and aerosols.

I rarely fill the boxes, but there is only one of me. I imagine I would easily if I was 4 people.
The green bin I fill up within 2 hours of them emptying it!
The black bin usually has about 3 supermarket sized bags in the bottom. That's mostly kitty litter; I'd only have 1 small bag a fortnight if she'd go outside.

I do also have a compost bin in the garden too, but there's only so much you can store and use!

This time of year I have so much garden waste I could easily fill the green bin twice a week. I've seriously considered using the black bin, after all it's not exactly going to do any harm in landfill and it also burns. However, there's a £1000 fine and a life prison sentence in addition to bad Karma and being reincarnated as a toad.

My choice would be to stop collecting the black bins this time of year. It's basically only yoghurt pots and tetra packs that go in, and you could fit a million in one bin! It's annoying they don't recycle more types of plastic and especially tetra packs (milk and juice cartons) like they do in some other places, because then you simply wouldn't need a black bin. The only other kind of rubbish I produce is forbidden in the black bins anyway; namely batteries, light bulbs and other electrical goods.

Prof - between our schemes, we could recycle everything. It's obviously possible so it's annoying!

We have a grey wheelie bin with a grey lid for landfill and a grey bin with a blue lid for recycling.

It works pretty well as a rule, they've just started doing a new system of collection, last week they collected our recyclables and this week it's the landfill, should be ok although we have the kitchen waste from the industrial kitchens downstairs to go in our rubbish bin so sometimes it gets over full, we produce one black bag of landfill waste per week usually, and that's if I go round emptying the bathroom and bedroom bins as well.