Recycling

We have 3 bins, Blue = Recycling, Brown= Garden & food waste, and Green = general waste. Our council wont collect glass though so we have to take bottles to the bottle bank. Our green bin usually only has one, perhaps two bags in it.

Our council has a good record on recycling.

Edit: Our bins are collected fortnightly,one week general, one week recycling & garden/food waste.

I’m rather unsure as to how well any council is doing with their recycling. I fear they are merely “ticking boxes”. I asked mine how it was all going after a year and was told it was going wonderfully well. They don’t want the ‘wrong’ kind of plastic, nor window envelopes (for some reason) and I cannot believe that there isn’t a lot of contamination in what they collect. There has been no feedback to help improve matters so I can only conclude that there’s no measurement going on, or it’s still going into landfill. 

The tendering process is the worse thing about our refuse collection. It can change each time it happens. I would like to think we do quite well on recycling though:

Black bin, general waste. This is collected weekly for us, as garden waste collector cannot reach us, lorry is too big for our road. We are allowed to put garden waste in here as well! But we don't, we compost it, or I put it into a green bin we have acquired, and trundle it fortnightly to where garden refuse lorry can reach it! Green waste collection ceases mid November until mid March anyway. (Which as any gardener will tell you is possibly when there is most to clear!)

Glass and tins fortnightly, never full, we don't drink much!

Paper and cardboard, fortnightly. We use most for lighting stove, so usefully recycled. If it gets too much, I have been known to dump packaging at supermarket. Let them deal with it at source, most things are over packaged!

Plastic is our problem, doesn't get collected so we have to take to recycle centre.

Our green bin is 'general' and blue bin is 'recyclable, both of the same size. For us at the end of two weeks at emptying time, the green is about 30% full and the blue is nearly overflowing.

By that 'scientific' view I would say our recycling comes in at around 70% by volume.

 

There’s a small flaw in your ‘rough’ calculation. Ignoring that the recycle bin is more than full, you recycle 100 out of 100+30. Or about 77%, by volume.

Nooooo! there's a small flaw in your interpretation of my calculation. Out of the 100% volume of what we take to our bins, it is separated 70/30.

This is the trouble with some posters on this Forum, what starts as 'Recycling' changes into mathematics, no wonder newcomers go away discontented when an attempt to change the topic is made on the first page

ooops meant to add comment, do you put your ash in garden recycle bin? We can't do that with oursMind you sister in law can recycle plastic containers and we can't do that either.

No it has to go in the general waste. In this  area you have to pay for a garden waste bin and it is for just garden waste. 

 The top document of the link below has a map for England on page 9 which shows percentage recycling by area. I presume there will be similar for Wales and Scotland somewhere. 

 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/local-authority-collected-waste-management-annual-results

We have four bins, two for different types of recycling plus clothes and shoes, collected every week. A wheelie bin for non recyclables, never really full for the fortnightly collection and a scrap food bin for recycling (but we usually compost veg scraps and rarely have anything else  left over.) We could have a green wheelie bin for garden waste but we don't need it and put everything on a big compost heap and anything hefty that we don't want we trailer to the composting bit of our waste depot.

Thinking about it we probably have more cardboard and waste paper than anything else, mostly unwanted fliers and food packaging. Sometimes I put that on the compost too! 

edit I see that the paper and cardboard match the stats on SteveL's post.

We don't recycle half as much as we could and it appears to be down to political will and locally negotiated contracts. There doesn't appear to be a centrally co-ordinated policy. Equally I know just from the bins on a CC site that there is a significant sector of the population just can't be arsed to do it properly anyway. We are probably destined to drown in our own detritus.

The council here are keen on recycling, though I don't know how well we are all doing.

We have a herd of 6 bins sitting outside, 3 green garden ones, a black general one,  and 2 for recycling, one for paper and cardboard and one for glass, plastic and tins

  Each is emptied every second week, thogh we had a letter to say they will be changing something soon, must try to find it!

The recycling ones are half size, so they are usually quite full, the general one is full size so it takes us at least 4 weeks to fill it.  There is also a little food one but we never have anything to go in that.

There seems to be so many different schemes, it does get confusing .

Just looked at the government website for recycling and it seems that a large proportion of waste plastic is exported to China , is that really being " green" ????