I’m all for doing my bit to help the environment, writes our Teen Blogger Rhian. In fact, it was my interest in recycling that got my whole family involved, long before the council started collecting recyclables every fortnight.
I’m not sure about alternative weekly collections though.
It seems to make sense, but for one thing, I’m sure there are better containers available for recyclable waste. There’s still plenty of it ends up scattered around my street after collection days, and for another, two weeks worth of domestic rubbish in a bin during hot weather (not that we’ve had much this year) is pretty gross.
Wouldn’t it be a better idea to concentrate on making firms reduce the amount of packaging they use, or having them use alternative packaging which is more environmentally friendly?
Apparently, New York is trying to persuade people to stop buying bottled water simply because it’s fashionable and is encouraging them to drink tap water instead. This is because four out of five empty plastic bottles end up in landfill sites. It’s even worse in the UK, I should think.
Almost everything comes in a plastic or foil containers which take an eternity to rot away. Where I work at Boots, they’ve changed all their plastic packages for sandwiches to cardboard ones so you can put them in your recycling boxes.
But you can’t with plastic, you have to take down to the recycling centre yourself, they’re not allowed as part of your recyclable waste collection and that’s pretty stupid, I think.
- Rhian is the Shropshire Star’s Teen Blogger, looking at life from a teenager’s perspective.
- Comment on her blog in the box below.
6 Comments
I totally agree. I drink a lot of fizzy drinks and at the end of the fortnight I have lots of these as waste. I understand that they can be recycled - so why are they not collected in with the red bin?
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I think the supermarkets in the towns should provide adequate recycling facilities and take some responsibility (both environmental and financial) for recycling. This would allow customers to discard of unnecessary packaging at the store. I know some stores probably already have these facilties but they should be actively encouraged by customers.
Its ridiculous that despite paying our council tax, that we still have to find the time to recycle our plastics at the local refuse centre. Provisions for this should be avaliable at our local supermarkets.
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Probably for the same inane reasons that we are not permitted to put compostable waste into the green bins.
They raised the council tax (which in theory is supposed to pay for refuse collection among other things) then they make it once a fortnight to collect, and now they are fining people for having bin bags around. Those that do have cars are ok, they can take their excess rubbish to the skips but those that do not have their own transport are totally stuffed!
So in a nutshell, we pay more, get less collections and are also being stung for not following the rules. Sounds like we are all being ripped off left right and centre to me!
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Many councils do collect plastics in their recyclables (correct me if I’m wrong but I was told they do in Oswestry) - but it is more difficult to process. As far as I can see plastics should be at the top of the list for recycling as they are mainly produced from a finite resource (oil), and unlike paper, cardboard and even metal, they take a long time to decompose in landfill.
Here in T&W, the council do not recycle plastics - I believe this to be because councils are set a government target for recycling and as long as they reach this target many of them are happy.
In my opinion they are not really interested in recycling itself. They just impose the easy options upon us - the council tax payers - just to meet their targets.
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Absolutely agree. Our local recycling bank will only take plastic bottles - so all the other plastic packaging (even though it has the triangle recycling symbol) has to go into the “black bin” waste. Very sad.
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There are many different types of plastic which makes separating them difficult and as far as I am aware, your average plastic drinks bottle can only be recycled into a sort of insulating fibre. In other words, plastic is a cheap and easy packaging material for manufacturers, but a nightmare for the environment. We’ve got to end our love affair with it. This is an issue which needs tackling by the Government at source, not by local councils struggling to avoid landfill fines. Good blog!
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