Rubbish collections
There has a been a lot of talk today about the frequency of rubbish collection in the UK. Apparently, many Councils are moving to alternate week collections: recyclables one week, and ordinary household rubbish the next. There have been a lot of complaints about this, with people saying that their bins smell or that they are getting maggot infestations. Inevitably, the Daily Mail has weighed in with the “The Great Dustbin Revolt”.
Personally, I think it’s revolting that people throw so much away, particularly food waste, which is what must be generating most of the smell and maggots. I know that not everyone has the space to compost food waste, but buying only as much as you need would be a start. If more councils offered a food/green waste collection along with other recyclables (with firmly sealing containers), a twice weekly collection shouldn’t be a problem at all. Another approach might be to offer a weekly collection, but charge by weight for non-recyclable waste, offering a credit for recyclable waste. I suspect that would focus people’s minds on reducing their waste output rather effectively.
We get a weekly household waste collection, with a fortnightly recycling collection (paper, cans and glass), but we fill about half a dustbin sack a week now that we compost our food scraps and green waste. The vast majority of what we throw away is plastic-like stuff that we can’t recycle locally, and some of which is deposited on our front drive by passing littering kids (grr…).
Japan has a fantastic (though rather complicated) recycling system because they have very little land available for landfill. Just because we’ve got a bit more land, I don’t see why we should waste it all by burying our rubbish.
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We have a fortnightly collection, if you have a wheelie-bin. If you live in a terraced house, you still put bags out and these are collected every week. There is also a separate collection for recyclables (Glass, tins and paper -- and shoes
), which is every week.
In our (admittedly two person) household, we can easily miss one collection with no trouble. But some of the houses in our street have bulging bins every fortnight. We compost our green waste, so the food bin usually has one small bag a week.
It can be done. Just requires a little bit of thought.
by SteveC @ 25/04/2007 5:28 pm • Permalink •
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But wouldn't a firmly sealing top blow off because of the gasses generated during decomposition? It's kind of a lose-lose situation: if you seal the bin to keep the smelly gasses from getting out, the gasses build up until they blow the top off, but if you put holes in the top to relieve the pressure, the smelly gasses get out!
Or, of course, I could be wrong about the whole gas thing. I'm not exactly a garbage expert...
by Aaron F. @ 25/04/2007 7:19 pm • Permalink •
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Of course, this is all based on the assumption that recycling everything is actually helping the environment - the way I see it, the jury is still out on that. We know that recycling aluminium is a good thing due to the sheer cost involved in producing it, but recyclying paper and plastic? Are we really that sure that it is better?
Recycling should be at the bottom of our list of priorities when it comes to saving our resources. Right at the top of the use should be reduction - supermarkets that insist in wrapping their fruit in veg in unnecessary plastic is one thing that could be cut back on. After that comes reuse - do we need to throw something away, or can it be reused?
The majority of paper that we use comes from tree farms - trees are cut down then new ones are planted. As an example, the amount of trees in the US alone is constantly on the increase - not what environmental extremists would have you believe. Some figures state that there is nearly 3 times as many trees in the US as there were nearly 100 years ago.
And what about the processes paper has to go through to get it into a reusable state. If it has been printed on it needs to be chemically de-inked. This stuff has to be collected in big trucks. What good does that do the environment? When you take that into account, is it really doing that much good?
As for landfills, its not like we are running out of space. We probably have more than enough room to landfill our rubbish without causing problems for the next 1000 years. By that point I'm sure we would have come up with a better solution.
People are generally happy to recycle because they feel like they are doing good. But how many people think they are doing good just because they have been told they are? How many people really sit down and consider the negative effects of recycling?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we don't have a problem. As a society we do over-consume and we can be irrepsonsible in the way we consume. But I'm not convinced that just saying "recycle recycle recycle" is the answer. The media places far too much emphasis on it. It should be more like "reduce consumption, reuse if you can and if all options are exhausted and its financially and environmentally sound to do so, then recycle". And what are the government trying to do in some areas? FORCE people to recycle without giving any kind of comprehensive justification for it. Madness. How about legislating against the amount of packaging the big supermarket chains use?
There are some further information on this wikipedia entry and I highly recommend tracking down the Recycling episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit!.
by Luke Redpath @ 25/04/2007 7:38 pm • Permalink •
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We've been on fortnightly collections for about a year now all told, first in Bracknell and now in Norfolk, and it's never caused us a problem.
As with you, BSAG, we do compost any food scraps (well, food peelings etc. - you're not really supposed to do owt with cooked food, as it attracts vermin, maggots etc.) and generally have one full black bag of household rubbish per fortnight.
The recycling bin is pretty much always full - plastics, cans, paper- although bizarrely neither one of the services our councils have used manage to recycle glass - that goes off every couple of months to a proper recycling glass-bank.
We've never had any kind of issue with too much rubbish in the household waste, nor maggots etc. But it's fascinating (as other people have commented) seeing how much stuff other people in our area waste.
by Lyle @ 26/04/2007 9:57 am • Permalink •
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SteveC: So how many pairs of shoes do you put in per week
AaronF: Possibly, though I think it might take more than a week. But you can get special compost containers which have charcoal filters in the top to let a bit of air in without letting the smell out.
Luke Redpath: I absolutely agree that reduction and reuse should certainly come first. And I take your point that recycling is sometimes not energy efficient, but it just seems wrong to me to bury waste in the ground if it could be recycled in some way, particularly if they take years to break down (if at all). I do think that it might be more efficient to compost newspaper than recycle it, though (which is what we do with some of ours).
Lyle: We almost never have the problem of food scraps needing to go in the bin. That's partly because we're greedy blighters, and partly because we tend to bung any excess into freezer containers for home-made ready meals later in the week
by bsag @ 26/04/2007 5:50 pm • Permalink •
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We have recently moved to Bristol & have been hearted by the difference to Newham (London) in generally how waste & the limitation of waste is tackled by ordinary people.
A few instances;
we have 3 local shops which operate on the 'scoop' principle. Big vats of rice, museli, flour, etc which you 'scoop' your required quantity into simple plastic bags. It doesn't get rid of the packaging problem, but greatly reduces it.
when people are tired of something, or replace it with a newer version, (a lamp, a bookshelf, children's toys - all things I've seen recently) they put them outside on a dry day. Inevitably they are gone in a few hours. We missed a lovely freestanding 'up-lighting' lamp because we said we'd grab it on the way back. It was gone an hour later. Even if it didn't work, it would have been easy to fix. Now we are looking to buy one at £40-60.
Our council now has fortnightly rubbish collection but weekly recycling collection. Seems to work fine except that plastics are not included - they say it is 'too difficult'. Unfortunately, for us, that is a big part of our waste output - yogurt, margarine containers etc. Curiously, we can take plastic bottles to a central point for recycling, but where does a bottle end and a container begin?
I do agree that actual consumption is the real issue. Jonathon Porritt recently brought that up, but (smugly) I've been saying that for around 30 years. Granted, I've not completely lived up to that lofty principle - but every little helps.
bsag: I agree about the food scraps. Leftover bits of dinners are eaten as lunch snacks the following day or frozen, so, apart from bones (for us carnivores) there should be little waste that cannot be composted. Our food waste container largely only has bones, olive pits and bits of cat food our irritatingly, and unpredictable, moggie disdainfully decides to ignore.
by Bernard Knight @ 27/04/2007 12:58 am • Permalink •
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Luke Redpath --
When you take that into account, is [paper recycling] really doing that much good?
As you already know, the answer according to most of the environmental organizations I've heard of (see, for example, this EPA web page) is yes. The Wikipedia page you cite talks a lot about the energy used in the "overall process" of recycling being greater than the energy used to make virgin stuff, but is virgin manufacturing being judged by the same standards of "overall" as recycling? The page mentions the energy costs of curbside recycling pickup, for example, but also notes that there are energy costs to maintaning and harvesting farm forests for virgin paper.
The ultimate problem I see with landfilling is that it pretty efficiently removes raw materials from the environment. Things in landfills tend not to decompose, which means the nutrients in them are effectively lost for a long time. The earth isn't going to run out of nitrogen or carbon any time soon, of course, but landfilling seems clearly unsustainable.
Cradle to Cradle, a book I've been reading, has some interesting things to say about the problems with recycling as we currently conceive it. I highly recommend it!
by Aaron F. @ 27/04/2007 1:36 am • Permalink •
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Looking at the responses it's another topic that touches a nerve, congrats bsag. We use the recycling a point in the village and our wheelie bin for a family of four is barely half full for the (weekly collection). Most of the recycling comes from the weekly shop, as others have said - THAT's where the target should be. I think composting food waste makes little difference to the bin fill, ours seems very little. The other main problem (I think) is council policy, ours gives households with 3+ children an extra bin, which most fill and put out for emptying!
by Julian @ 27/04/2007 7:51 am • Permalink •
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I think that whilst the Japanese sort their rubbish carefully, my apartment had a bin with compartments, it's for incineration rather than recycling!
by Julian @ 27/04/2007 8:00 am • Permalink •
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Kerbside recycling rates will increase dramatically with well organised fortnightly collections. Our borough has gone from nowhere to being in the top 10 councils in the UK in a couple of years.
Whilst I agree with Luke that reduction and reuse should come first, you have to remember that local councils have no control over either.
Councils will receive huge fines if landfill isn't reduced and recycling increased. If those targets aren't met all of us will be facing big council tax increases and the charming prospect of living with massive incinerators (that seem to be most council's preferred solution to landfill issues).
P.S. Another good place to put cooked food scraps is in the dog. if you haven't got one, find a neighbour who has (no cooked bones please).
by Ian Parr @ 29/04/2007 8:26 pm • Permalink •
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Ben Bradshaw, the environment minister, risked the anger of Middle England by arguing that the evidence suggested that it was relatively straightforward to start collecting rubbish once every two weeks in non-urban areas.
He told the Commons communities and local government select committee that it would be much more difficult to move to fortnightly collections in inner-city areas. Mr Bradshaw also voiced reservations over claims that AWCs increased recycling. He conceded that many of the authorities using the system already had high rates before abandoning weekly rounds.
Our Council has introduced this scheme in Oxford City despite such warnings that they do not work in inner cities with a high transient population - our pavements are now rubbish tips.
by Eric @ 10/06/2007 6:00 am • Permalink •
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I have recently trialled with fantastic results a product called Bin Fresh.
Now, we have alternate weekly collections and up until recently have had fairly gros bins. The maggots have not been too bad (apart from one fairly horrific attack!) but the smell has been horrible and the flies swarming around where we leave our bins have been horrible.
However now we have no flies around the bin (which in turn means we don't have any maggots) and the bins smell so much better.
All we do is drop one Bin Fresh wipe on top of the rubbish in the wheelie bin, daily. It's that simple. And very good value too at £7.99 for two months' worth.
I'd be interested to find out if anyone else had used this product?!
Sophie
by Sophie Collison @ 27/06/2007 2:35 pm • Permalink •
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i think dat the rubbish thing is appauling
by kelsey scott @ 29/06/2007 11:51 am • Permalink •
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I have a two week collection for all my food waste and we were getting flies and maggots in our bin. I am now using a product called Wheelie Fresh. You sprinkle on the waste and it stops flies and maggots. Dont ask me how. you can get it from e bay or i think they might have a web site ?
by bob @ 17/07/2007 8:27 pm • Permalink •
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