British Expatriate Network

I am a recycle freak. I recycle or re-use everything I possibly can, I buy second-hand goods -and not just 'cause it's cheaper- ; ) etc.

I am in favour of fines/penalties for people failing to sort their recyclables from their trash in areas where a recycling pick-up is available at no extra cost. But this is nuts

http//news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/south_west/6058952.stm

Apart from the issue that it might stop people recycling altogether, how on earth was that proven beyond reasonable doubt?

I love the can/bottle deposit system here in Michigan -10c per item, feed them into a machine to get your dosh. 10c is enough to make many people do it, and certainly enough to entice charities to collect and recycle and the unemployed pick up those thrown down in the street. We should handle more packaging in this way, I think.

/radical hippy moment ;)

I thought they were encouraging recycling. Tie it into Baa Baa and you have a place that becomes less inviting. A nanny state.

That sort of treatment would put me off recycling too.

Here, we can just throw cardboard, cans, paper bags etc. in the same bin. The only one that is different is the one for glass - otherwise, I guess someone sorts them out for you.

I like it as it means I can rent the smallest garbage can and not over-fill that each week.

We get about 5 cents for glass bottles and cans. The stupid thing is though that although this is a state law, when you put them in the machines to get scanned, they only accept bottles or cans that they sell in that store, so we end up just dumping a bunch in the garbage cans at the recycling point roll

We just lob everything into the same bin here - even glass. Rumke have a combination of manual and automatic sorting that does the job.

In Bristol you get all sorts of crap to recycle with - and you have to get it right too. There's a black bin for recylcing paper. You can recycle glass but it must not be broken (even though the minute the truck pulls up the chuck it all in the back and it breaks) but you cannot recycle plastic of any kind. There's also a wacky two-in-one brown bin in which you put all your food waste to "recycle" into compost. The council is explicit that you cannot put food waste, paper, cardboard, glass, garden waste or wood into the regular garbage - which makes you wonder what you can actually just throw away.

In Muskegon we had a friendly recycling place pick up a bin full of plastic, glass, cans and paper (only the milk gallon plastic though, no other numbers accepted). Plastic, glass and cans can be mixed, paper needs to be separate.

I can understand them wanting glass intact, it protects the workers who have to pick it up. Once it's in the back of the truck it doesn't touch them.

We have a separate paper pick up, a mixed plastic, glass and tins pickup once a week and garbage twice a week. One of my garbage pick ups is Monday and I don't notice it's a holiday until my garbage is still there in the evening mad

Rumpke accepts all types of plastic here. It used to be 1 and 2 only, but they said the market has picked up for all types.

We have two bins. A blue one for all recyclable goods and a black one for rubbish. It generally takes two weeks to fill the small black one but we tend to borrow space amongst the neighbours bins for recycling. We also have a bin for green waste for those who put the garden clippings out, but don't like tp put them in the road.
We also have a hoodie who comes at 5am and goes thru the recycling looking for glass and plastic bottles and wakes one of the neighbours who eventually called the cops on him. They didn't come. I tried to make it easier for him and put all the bottles in an old yellow recycling bin besides the big blue one, but the dummy took the yellow bin, so now he's back to bin diving before the cops come. roll

That's just it, though, in the UK - the garbage men haven't touched garbage in ages. They have those special bins that the garbage men just wheel to the truck, attach to the truck and the truck does the rest (opens lid as it is being lifted to empty into truchk).

I agree with Pilgrim, that that type of attitude would put us off recycling too. We try our best to recycle as much as we can. We also get the money back thing (5c) but it is a waste of time bothering because, just as someone else said, you take the bottles down to the bottle bank and they either won't take the majority of them because they have decided they don't take that particular one (even though you would have bought it from there) or it is full and no one has bothered to empty it :roll: So, instead of having the problem that it all goes into the regular garbage we just put all the 5c bottles into the bottle recycling. I would love it if a charity offered to come and pick them all up and get the money for them.

We have two pick-ups: paper and cardboard one week, all in together, and bottles, cans and plastic then next, again all in together.

I would be very happy for our local pick-ups to do one for composting too. I liked that idea when I saw it last time I went back to the UK.

That sounds like a fantastic idea, but then what will *they* do with them?

:lol:

Our local convenience store - at least local until this week as we're moving down the shoreline to Holland - used to just have someone manning the back of the store where they dumped them in bins and gave you cash from the register.

Now they have gone hi-tech and have a single machine for cans, glass and plastic bottles. It's pretty slick. And they empty it on a frequent basis. Although one item got refused they were only too happy to give me the money for it manually as they sold the item.

That store is one of the few things I'll miss about living Muskegon. That and the great Pita Place just up the road.