Waste disposal and recycling

Different villages have different recycling. We have orange bags collected once a week, a green bin for garden waste ie weeds, tree branches etc.can be rented for a few months of the year.
My 3 female colleagues live in 3 different villages and all 3 have different rubbish/recyling bins and collection days. Out of the 4 of us my area is the only 1 that has weekly rubbish/recycle collections.
 
Frizz1974 said:
The whole thing is a bit of a nightmare here really. We suck at it to be honest.

Where I live, which is about 4 hours drive from SNSSO, we have a yellow lidded wheelie bin for plastic, glass & cans. This is supposedly sorted elsewhere. However, most people don’t know that anything with a lid on is rejected as the lids are generally a different sort of plastic. This is emptied fortnightly. We have a weekly pick up of the general waste bin with a red lid. Green waste is collected just twice a year.

We were better at when I was a child.

There used to be 5c return on bottles & “cash a can” was massive here in the 1970’s with aluminium being scrapped for cash by weight. Almost every house had a can squasher attached to a fence post or the side of the garage and usually some sort of large crate to store the squashed cans until there was enough to make it worth it to take them in.

My maternal grandfather used to supplement his pension by walking the streets of their home town collecting cans, I remember it embarrassed my Dad who had an electrical contracting business there.


The bottled water industry, of which I was a part for 5 years, has a lot to answer for. Tap water is available almost everywhere in Australia & it’s of a very high standard that some visitors are amazed we use it for showering, washing & flushing the toilet.

I could go on & on...
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If we start on lids that'll be at least another five containers on colours alone, three for plastic type.

I may be old fashioned, but if I'm paying someone to take the rubbish, why should I be doing part of the job I'm paying them to do? What would be their response if I deducted for my time I wonder.
 
The milk I get from the milkman comes in glass bottles. When my ex-husband was a milkman, the dairy (predecessor of the one I use now), they had an experiment whereby you got one pint of milk per milk bottle you returned. It was a complete failure, because if you cancelled your order for a couple of days or so (it was in the days when you left a note out for the milkman) you may not have had a bottle to put out when you next wanted milk. It was also practically impossible to order extra milk.

The milk from the farm comes in plastic bottles now. The farm is over 200 miles away from where I live, and glass bottles are not practical. They did use cartons for a while, but recycling the cartons (tetrapak) costs far more than recycling plastic bottles.

Most of their veg is delivered loose in cardboard boxes, although some (tomatoes, mushrooms) still come in papier mache trays in a paper sleeve. Soft fruit still comes in plastic containers which are recyclable, although our local council will not take any form of plastic food containers. Eggs come in papier mache egg boxes. Yoghurt and cream comes in thicker plastic tubs, which are reusable - ideal for using the freezer for soups, stock, and even stuffed peppers! Nets for citrus fruits, garlic and ginger are compostable. They are however deciding whether to deliver the veg in plastic boxes instead of cardboard ones, because again (apart from the obvious fact that the plastic boxes will last a lot longer than the cardboard ones, which can only be reused about 10 times) they have found that it costs them far less to send the plastic boxes to be recycled than the cardboard ones.

Some of the dog food I buy is in plastic trays. As it is made from food fit for human consumption and the trays are food-safe, I keep the well-washed trays and reuse them in my fridge or freezer. They are ideal for freezing single portions of meat, fruit, or veg, although too small for a complete meal. I also discovered the other day that they are the right size for one portion of pizza dough! Some become dishes for dry cat food, and some become bases for the trays I grow my herbs in. They can be used several times before they go in the general waste.
 
I don't often feel sympathy for my local council, but it does tend to come out whenever I visit a recycling bank. The other day, we went to dispose of some paper and cardboard and the paper bin was crawling (literally) with rotting vegetables. There was all sorts of junk dumped all over the ground and some delightful character had evidently decided that the bins were just the place to dump bags of dog waste.

When you have idiots like this around, it's difficult not to feel sorry for the unfortunate council workers that have to clear it all up.
 
I have a very large wheeled can that our recyclables go in and is picked up once a week. I usually only put mine to the curb every other week as i am only one person and the bin is big enough to hold three actual people. My neighbor's can is always over flowing everyweek but his is a family of 7.
They take a bunch of different things from glass of multiple colors, to plastic with i think the number 1-7 in the little triangle, newspaper, regular paper, cardboard, food cans, and aluminum.
Before they handed out the big wheel cans they had us using 2 small plastic bins that had to be lugged to the curb which was hard for the elderly and handicapped. Ironically when they replaced the recycling bins with the big wheeled can the recycling bins were not made of plastic that the community could recycle and so most household still have those two bins being used for things around the house...mine hold the extra floor tile in the garage and my sister's became planters.
 
Coincidentally, our local Council has now issued new recycling rules! All plastics must go in the general waste (for landfill) except for clear plastic drinks and shampoo bottles. Tetrapaks and other plastic coated card containers (such as crisp and drinking chocolate containers) must now go in the general waste too, along with all plastic food containers and trays. Foil including food containers must now go in the general waste. All food waste, cooked or uncooked, must go in the general waste too (not in this house!).

I daren't look at the rest of the list, which is several pages. I thought we were supposed to be recycling more, not chucking more of it in landfill.
 
Frizz1974 said:
The 10c return on bottles & cans hopefully means less landfill here.
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Only if more places start stocking the recycling centres specific to them. There's one in our area, some 65km away. That's it. It costs more in fuel to recycle them than they are worth even when 2 of our 4 recycling boxes are full of nothing but them. The last lot ended up at the tip in conventional recycling.
Plus anything purchased in multipacks still doesn't have a barcode on the actually bottle/can get so despite being charged the extra for them at point of purchase, you can't get recycle them 7 months after the 10c law came into effect.
 
It’s still a step in the right direction.

We have a return station in the car park of the “local” Coles shopping centre. About 20km away.

I drive 50km to Bathurst each day and I think there are at least 2 return set ups there.
 
I like making sure all our rubbish goes in the correct bin - we have 4 different ones, but there is a lot to remember if you want to get it right.
It's also confusing that different councils use different coloured bins and allow different stuff in them. I get it wrong when I go to my parents and Miss K get it wrong when she comes home from uni. Now we're on holiday in Cornwall and it's different again!
 
We have waste bags for our dogs poop. They have the recycling symbol on them. I wonder if they are to be recycled before or after use?:scratchhead:
 
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