Anyone else have trouble recycling stuff?

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I've been trying to recycle as much paper as I could, for the sake of the environment, but somehow society wants to make it as difficult as possible... they already pick it up once every two weeks... they're going to cut councils' funds even more now, so it's probably going to be even worse... if so, I'm going to have to start to throw everything out my window or something, as I have no alternative...

Our city council is rather obscure with its recycling rules, though it's improved. They give us a plastic bag and there's some types of stuff they want and other types they don't want. A few years ago they had open-top boxes for the same purpose, so they could see inside and refuse to take it if you put anything in it that they didn't want. Imagine the mess when it rained though. It was such a putoff for me that I tended not to bother recycling at all. The other thing that tends to put me off a bit is that they don't pay me for the recyclable stuff I give them, and I'm not sure what they pay their staff or their directors. I think it's important to boycott ventures that don't run on socialist principles, but I don't know how to get the info on their pay scales, so I don't know what to do. Quite the dilemma.

The closest thing to recycling here is that if you drop something off next to the dumpster hoarders will take it.

Yes, I'm in the UK too and I have to say, they make it a pain in the behind.

I truly want to do the right thing as I believe we need to be better about what we're doing to the environment. But my local council have such convoluted rules, regulations, instructions and restrictions on what they will or will not pick up, the condition it needs to be in, they won't take yoghurt pots and plastic ready meal trays, etc and I literally get confused by all the ins and outs.

And yes, if there's something in there they don't take, they refuse to take the entire contents.

I live in a block of flats and tenants have actually been giving a telling off because of that. The council refused to unload the entire skip-sized container because someone had thrown the wrong thing in. One of the staff said she had to climb into the container to get it out, and she was pissed off at all of us. We get given hell for putting the wrong things in.

If the council made it extremely simple and direct, like "Just give us ALL your plastics as is, ALL your glass as-is" it wouldn't be a pain to sort out for most people.

They also want everything rinsed out thoroughly and all labels soaked off. Yet by making me run my hot water and carefully soak and rinse these items, aren't I increasing my carbon footprint by the extra hot water I'm having to use on the recyclables I'm cleaning for them?

I now have a massive backlog of plastics and glass in my kitchen because I'm getting overwhelmed by the tasks involved.

I just don't know what to do with plastic packaging. Do I put it in with the glass bottles? It just looks weird in there.

We have three big bins: blue is paper recycling, red is general garbage and yellow is glass and (hopefully) plastic.

My apartment complex doesn't even have that option..

I find it troubling.

It can get ever so confusing.

I never wash plastics or soak labels off glass. I value my hot water and anyway, I find the whole process stressful.

Anything I'm not sure of goes in the nearest public bin

I find the whole process stressful too -- but my council collectors cause trouble for the people who run my building if we don't soak the labels off and wash out the items, and then the people who run my building cause trouble for us and try to track down who did it. It's hellish.

I live in a rural area where we don't have any public trash or recycling pick up. You have to either pay for a private service, or take it somewhere yourself. So I recycle or donate as much as I can to avoid having to take anything to the landfill.

There are recycling bins in the next county over, so I take as much as I can there, mainly paper and plastics, and cardboard with graphics on it. Fortunately it's single steam now, so it doesn't have to be sorted, and they take pretty much every kind of plastic except #6. And they just want things rinsed out, not washed or labels soaked off.

I take cans and other scrap metal to a salvage yard. They also take wires and cords. Styrofoam trays and plastic bags/wrap go in the bins at the grocery store. Other misc. items like printer cartridges go wherever I can find a bin for them. Clothes, shoes, books, etc. go in donation bins.

I save glass bottles and jars to use in the garden as flowerbed borders. And I also put down plain brown or white cardboard in the garden as a weed blocker. I throw food scraps out in the yard (wouldn't waste my time trying to compost it, since wild animals will just get into the compost bin.)

I don't have a lot of actual garbage to throw away, mainly things like food wrappers and bathroom trash, or stuff that is broken beyond repair, or things like old worn out shoes that aren't worth donating. Plus sometimes I will toss out the odd item I'm too lazy to recycle, like a battery or light bulb or a piece of tin foil. I take trash to the dumpster at my parents' house.

All the recycling bins and thrift stores are a 15-30 minute drive from my home. I don't make special trips to them, I try to just drop things off whenever I happen to be near one. And my job takes me to a different place every day, so I'm always going to pass by something.

The problem is I have to think about where I will be going on what days, and what bins I will be passing by, and what I need to put in the car to take with me. It's too complicated and changeable to ever get it down to a routine.

So things tend to accumulate in the house. I have lots of bins and baskets and bags around the house to collect and sort stuff, but somehow it still isn't enough. Things are always overflowing the containers, and I also end up with little piles of stuff in categories that don't have designated containers.

Sometimes I just throw stuff down wherever because I get so damn tired of having to go put it in a special bin.

It's really aggravating and overwhelming, and sometimes I feel like giving up and chucking it all in a dumpster.

If they would just put a sticker on the offending item, it would greatly help people to work out what they'd done wrong. But they won't.


Hmmm........"procrustean (adj.): marked by arbitrary, often ruthless, disregard of individual differences or special circumstances." Councils and housing authorities seem to love that way of doing things. Easy for them, hard for us. Some councils even installed "bin-cams" into people's wheely bins until there was an outcry about their Orwellian practices. But I suppose at least they were trying to catch the actual offenders instead of hammering the lot of us, so maybe we should have been grateful.


Yes, and it's you who pays for the hot water, and it's you who provides the labour. Stealth-tax. I wouldn't be surprised if their idea of ecology was intellectually bankrupt. I've seen theories that suggest we're better off burning our trash than recycling it, once you factor in the transport and processing . I also suspect that the whole recycling industry is more about fatcats making money than any sincere wish to save the planet.

Back in the 1970s I knew hippies who painstakingly recycled everything they could, while government and industry did nothing but wreck the planet. I really thought society was progressing when the ecological thing was finally picked up by the Establishment, but it seems they've just sublimated it.

I think you're on the ball with all of this, Tough Diamond, sad to say, but it all fits.

I started encouraging my family to recycle cans/bottles, when I was younger. Now, as an adult, I would say it’s one of my obsessions. We regularly have more stuff in our recycle bins (which also includes a compost bin), than any of our neighbors.

I did when I lived with my parents. Recycling was not done in that county except for a short time & they quit doing it.

Why would you have to throw it out the window? Don't you have a garbage can? We don't have recycling here at all. Everything goes in the garbage can and out to the garbage truck. If you want to recycle and you live here, you have to take it about an hour away.

Paper and cardboard are the only materials I recycle. Everything else I cut into small pieces and hide among general garbage.

Why do you have to hide it? Don't you have garbage bags there?