Reduce, reuse, recycle

[Cyrano]

Thought we were good with our boxes that collect glass, tins, plastic bottles, paper and cardboard which we take every couple of weeks to the recycle centre

Have been watching BBC2's "No Waste Like Home" and feel there is more we should be doing

What are your tips

Reid

 

[jen_uk]

Dont leave appliances on standby, always switch them off. Dont fill your kettle to the top, just put the water you need in.

 

[AlanUK]

If you have a garden then composting waste or investing in a wormery are good ideas

I always feel we should be recycling more. Recently I phoned the council to ask about some polystyrene packaging I was looking to dispose of and I was told that whilst it could be recycled there were no facilities locally to do so and that I would have to dispose of it as non recyclable. I was a bit disappointed by this I think all local authorities ahould look into providing a full range of recycling facilities.

Part of me also feels like we should do more to grow our own food in our garden but the limited size of it and our lack of time combine to put me off enough for it not to happen. One of the things that has recently come to my attention is the number of miles that supermarket food has to travel in order to make it onto the shelf and the effect that this has on our environment. One day maybe I will be spurred into action!

Sorry for the rambling

Alan.

 

[Hilary]

We try to do our bit but, like Alan, we're disappointed that there aren't more facilities locally to make it easier for us all to recycle as much as possible.

We've had a doorstep recycling collection every two weeks for the past year or so, but that's only for paper, glass and cans. The milkmen around here deliver plastic milk bottles which don't go back to the milkman, but the local recycling depot can't take plastic That's an awful lot of plastic going into landfill sites!

I suppose we should be prepared to make more effort and I quite like the policy of penalising households not recycling enough - but that would take a great deal more effort on the part of the local councils to provide adequate facilities.

 

[Miffy2003]

Dont leave appliances on standby, always switch them off. Dont fill your kettle to the top, just put the water you need in.

And this reduces your energy bills too. Turn your themostat down by just one degree - you won't notice the difference - and you can save between £15 to £20 per year as well

Part of me also feels like we should do more to grow our own food in our garden

Crikey Alan!! My parents used to rent an allotment to do this very thing (in addition to having a fairly big back and front garden) and it was hard work and a lot of effort. I hate to say it but there's no way I'm doing that! I know you can do it on a smaller scale too though but I don't know where I'd put them! Have you ever read a book called "Shopped"? Pretty horrifying stuff about supermarkets.

Reid, it sounds like you do a lot already to me but I agree we should all do more.

 

[ERICS MUM]

If you have a garden then composting waste or investing in a wormery are good ideas

... One of the things that has recently come to my attention is the number of miles that supermarket food has to travel in order to make it onto the shelf and the effect that this has on our environment. ...


Alan.

I thught the same thing last week when I noticed that the punnet of strawberries I bought in Sainsbury's had been grown in Herefordshire. We live in Essex, which is nextdoor to Cambridgeshire, the biggest strawberry-growing county in the Uk. Why move strawbs 150 miles cross country when we have them on our doorstep??

Linda

 

[AlanUK]

I saw something on the TV recently where fruit and veg grown in this country was shipped to somewhere like Poland to be washed and prepared before being shipped back to the central supermarket depot before being packed on delivery trucks and sent all around the UK. I was shocked

 

[Dimplenose]

Turn your themostat down by just one degree - you won't notice the difference

I've heard this one before and often thought there must come a point where you do notice, otherwise we could just turn it down 1 degree every year - sorry just rambling thoughts.....BTW our villa air conditioning was set at a higher temperature than our home central heating and it felt very chilly.

(Oh yes - I've just remembered a really big energy saving tip - don't buy your son a PS2, our bills have shot up since Christmas.)

Libby

 

[diberry]

Our local council has recently introduced green wheelie bins + a separate box for glass, as well as the old black bins so we now have 2 bins which are emptied alternate weeks. We always recycled glass and paper but I 've been really surprised that our green bin (paper, plastic, tins) fills up much quicker than the ordinary dustbin which I think is quite encouraging - but I do wonder how many people in a large city actually bother to put things in the right bins?

 

[BONZO]

We've been enthusastic recyclers for years and the local council is quite forward thinking in it's actions and is now a Beacon Council for dealing with waste.

the council have provided the following to each household: -

Green box - for paper and cardboard

Black box - For bottles and glass

Purple box - for plastic, tins, cans and foil

Large Brown wheelie bin - for garden waste, coffee grounds etc


Green box and Black / Purple box taken on alternate weeks

Brown wheelie bin taken each week.

I reckon we only have 1/2 a black sack of "other" household rubbish taken per week now.

Compost bins and water butts supplied at knock down prices to local people.

Lots of mini recycling places around the borough in car parks etc as well as larger operations, so it's a BIG thumbs up down here

 

[Queenie]

We have the green bin system here too and we really make an effort to put stuff in the right bin, it's amazing how quickly it fills up, especially as it only gets emptied every four weeks. We also take our glass bottles to the recycle place as it's in our supermarket car park.

I feel guilty as we use the car so much but then we live in a village on the outskirts and there's no way we could live without driving everywhere. We run a business that involves posting out several packages of CDs a week. We always reuse envelopes (we get 15 - 20 packages of CDs a week) so we haven't bought padded envelopes in years! We use the business envelopes for our ebay sells and posting stuff to friends and family too as we've got literally hundreds!

 

[Cyrano]

Thanks Guys keep the ideas and suggestions covered.
Embarassed to admit that our Council only collect newspapers once per month and weekly bin of general rubbish every week. Rumour has it that collections will be reduced to fortnight in 2006 as landfill sites are filling fast

We have no garden, so wish I knew what to do with food waste as wormary and composting sound excellent ideas.

Reid

 

[carolfoy]

Good thread Reid, very environmentally conscious, I try and do as much as possible, always recycle paper products and glass, trouble is being on my own and not a tinned food person I can take a month to fill any particular recycling bag, I always chuck excess food into the compost when I have it but I don't have a lot as I ONLY buy fruit and veg from the farmers market, its delicious and you don't end up buying a prepackaged ton that you won't use, its also far better tasting than anything you get in a supermarket and the peas for instance aren't flown thousands of miles from south africa just to save me 3P!
I do use the car more than I should but it is only a 1600 engine, I certainly couldn't afford to run a 2 +litre!
I also always reuse the plastic bags you get from the supermarket, they are a terrific waste of resources!

 

[Obi Wan Kenobi]

We do very well in our area, our residents recycle at a rate of 44%
we have a black box for tins, glass, newspapers and clothing for rag making, a green wheely bin for garden compost. These are collected every fortnight.

We have introduced plastic recycling at our mini recycling centres, for PET (pop bottles) and HDPE (Milk bottles and "comfort" style containers) these can be recycled. all others cannot. For seven of these sites for plastics, its costing £66,000 a year, to collect from the household, its around £1 Million!

Due to the green garden waste being taken to an organic site, cardboard cannot be put into the bins (used by some councils to soak up the detrius from the grass cuttings, then used as landfill cover) and the compasny who re uses the newspapers cannot have it in their system.

Also DEFRA will not allow food waste into the green bins, due to Foot & Mouth restrictions.

Whilst people want to recycle in the main, they don't want an increase in their council tax to cover it, and the Government is obsessed by weight, i.e. they will give some money towards taking weight out of the general waste stream,but plastics etc..have very little weight so we have had to fund the plastics ourselves.

Within 7 years, the landfill areas will be full and no more can be sent to landfill. This will mean more incinerators to remove the waste.
Also, for every tonne of waste going to landfill the government is going to start to charge £250 per tonne over your allotted amount, this will be passed on to the households, or cuts in other services will have to be made to cover the people who steadfastly refuse to recycle.

We will start to collect recyclables every week and general waste once a fortnight to try and force people to recycle, but the problem is those who wont recycle will find other ways of getting rid of their rubbish, lanes, other peoples homes etc..

what we need is the supermarkets to
a) stop giving away plastic bags
b) stop producing ready meals in vacuum formed plastic trays which cannot be recycled
c) reduce the amount of throwaway packaging around the dammned stuff!
d) NOT to go down the road of tetrapak containers for fluids as a replace ment for recyclable tins, as they are a blend of plastic and coating, which cannot be seperated.
We have to reduce the amount of waste produced at source, not have costly ways of getting rid of the waste afterwards.

 

[Cyrano]

Obi Wan, I agree about stopping the packaging at source. Since we don't have a farmers market I've started to buy fruit/veg loose at supermarket or if no other choice buy prepacked and give the packaging back to the checkout - make them pay to get rid of it

Mind you, I get some funny looks as the tomatoes etc roll all over the place

Reid

 

[carolfoy]

c) reduce the amount of throwaway packaging around the dammned stuff!

Totally agree Obi, it also goes for EVERYTHING we buy, I mean if you buy a shirt you get tissue paper, plastic clips and plastic packaging as well!

 

[Hilary]

Since a trip to France, where everyone had their own shopping bags, I have refused plastic carrier bags at supermarkets here, and always take my own supply of reusable bags. I've been amazed at how insistent I sometimes have to be when the cashier starts packing things in plastic carriers for me - I take everything out again and put it in my own bags!

I used to tell myself it was okay to take plastic carriers because I 'recycled' them as bin liners until one of the cashiers told me they weren't degradable bags so would clog up the landfill sites! Why on earth can't supermarkets use degradable bags if they're going to use bags at all?

 

[Obi Wan Kenobi]

They do, however biodegradable bags require sunlight to degrade them and in a landfill, you dont get the degridation occurring.

 

[Hilary]

They do, however biodegradable bags require sunlight to degrade them and in a landfill, you dont get the degridation occurring.

From what I've read about it, I understood that only a few branches of the Co-op were trying degradable bags - none of the other chains use them. Is that out of date information, and have more of them changed over now?

Although, if the process doesn't work in landfill, I suppose it wouldn't help anyway!

 

[pmcpmc]

We try to do our bit but, like Alan, we're disappointed that there aren't more facilities locally to make it easier for us all to recycle as much as possible.

We've had a doorstep recycling collection every two weeks for the past year or so, but that's only for paper, glass and cans. The milkmen around here deliver plastic milk bottles which don't go back to the milkman, but the local recycling depot can't take plastic That's an awful lot of plastic going into landfill sites!

I suppose we should be prepared to make more effort and I quite like the policy of penalising households not recycling enough - but that would take a great deal more effort on the part of the local councils to provide adequate facilities.

Plastics
Plastic is a very difficult and expensive item to collect for recycling.

At the moment there are no appropriate plastic recycling companies in the local area, so any plastic collected for recycling needs to be transported long distances across the UK to a processing company. Plastic is very light and would need to be sorted into the different types, squashed and baled to make it cost and environmentally effective to transport it these long distances.

But there are great demands from the public for plastic recycling facilities and because of this it has been decided to collect plastic bottles at the Baling Plant Civic Amenity Site and Clyne Civic Amenity.
Hope this Helps.