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Do you recycle?

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Tryphena Absent

17:56 / 05.07.05

It occured to me the other day that we don't seem to have a thread about recycling or ecological products. I'm really starting it because over the last couple of years it's become really easy to recycle, particularly in London and I was wondering how many of us actually do?

I've become the type of person who gets upset when someone puts a glass bottle in the bin (sometimes when feeling particularly moral I put my hand in the bin and pull them about again) and it horrifies me that I didn't do it before. I try to recycle all of the glass, plastic and paper that goes through my flat. I only buy Ecover cleaning products and try to do so with washing powder - although that's rather expensive... So I was wondering do you recycle? And what about all the other little things that you can do for the environment- special plugs for your fridge, micro-generation, compost? Tell me about it!

18:24 / 05.07.05

I recycle (plastic, glass, aluminum, paper) and reuse whatever whenenever I can, though I have to admit that I have two environentally unfriendly habits: 1) I use disposable convenience cleaning items (favorites are antibacterial wipes and dust mops, which is awesome for my allergies) and 2) use and won't reuse certain things (like sandwich and storage baggies) that I COULD reuse. my daughter and all of our litter using pets are down to about a single bag of trash a week, and most often that's not even full.

said bag, however, is not eco-friendly. I've gotten ace at recycling and cutting down on waste, but not so much with using green products. I think I might find my way a little easier when my girlfriend and her friend make good on their plans to open a green home store!

18:30 / 05.07.05

Yay! A thead that I can be geeky and dull in.

Recycling: Paper, cardboard (including loo roll inners, all food packaging and cigarette boxes) plastic bottles, cans and tins and foil packaging, glass, shoes, metal, batteries. We have one half bag of rubbish a week and it mostly contains plastic packaging and polystyrene. It annoys me so much that you cannot easily recycle these things that I'm starting to avoid buying products with too much plastic packaging. ready meals are the very worst kind of this evil.

I buy recycled loo-roll, (Nouvelle is recycled and it's in every supermarket. Why do people need pink flowery loo roll? Why?) low energy light-bulbs, all the Ecover cleaning and washing products I can, Goodness direct is an ace site for such things.

We also have a Bokashi bin. They rock.

It's not recycling, but it's green thinking; I recommend the fridge savaplug, from C.A.T who know everything there is to know about such things. and soon I will have green electricity.

I have big issues about recycling and get very soap boxy about it. Did you know that in Birmingham (the country's second biggest city) you cannot recycle plastic bottles anywhere but in sleepy Somerset you can?

Also in Birmingham, they have just stopped the black box colllection because the council withdrew the funding. This is utterly outrageous and I am going to write to my MP.

18:40 / 05.07.05

Anyone who can and doesn't should be buried in landfill. I am an eco-nazi like Anna, although frustratingly here in Brighton only some houses get recyclable collection, the rest have to pay a special company to do it (RAAARGH! B'STARDS! WHAT IS MY TAX FOR THEN?!) so not as much as I would like to.
My top tips are taking a bag to the shop, using the bottle bank religiously, using ecover and alternative green-friendly stuff to clean with (e.g. baking soda, vinegar etc.) and having a compost heap.

Excess and unnecessary packaging is my pet hate. I use greengrocers etc. so you don't have everything in a plastic tray plastic packed in a plastic bag, all of which takes 10,000 years to degrade.

18:49 / 05.07.05

Websites:

'Recycle for London'

UK Wide 'Recycle Now' site.

It's so easy, even if you don't get a collection all you need is a few stack boxes and the location of a good recycling centre. I think those recycling bin things are pretty useless for anything other than the obvious cans and bottles.

Also, look out for rPET products in the Autumn, that article from the very excellent WRAP site.

paranoidwriter waves hello

18:56 / 05.07.05

May I also recommend www.greenshop.co.uk/ as well? Someone left their catalogue in our bathroom the other day which was so good and entertaining I ended up gettting a numb-bum. Lots of nice gadgets and ideas. e.g The Solar Cap, Remarkable (Pencils) Ltd, the wind-up mobile phone charger, etc.

Tryphena Absent

19:09 / 05.07.05

I'm really lucky in that the local recycling centre is about 15 minutes away and the street recycling is about 5 or 10 minutes and on the way to the tube, so I generally just take carrier bags full of recyclable products to the bins about twice a week. We do have a doorstep service but they don't take plastic, which makes up about half of our waste and I have to go to the centre to recycle cardboard, which I intend to do this week.

Tryphena Absent

19:13 / 05.07.05

Oh and by the way the British government are offering a solar energy grant scheme at the moment. It's a good thing to know even if you can't do it!

19:23 / 05.07.05

Cardboard recycling is excellent because if you keep it in a box like we do, you get to jump up and down on it when it appears full and magically it's suddenly two thirds empty again.

That counts for fun in my house. I am seriously tragic.

20:11 / 05.07.05

1. Recycling. Yes. Although laissez faire about glossy paper in with the newsprint.

2. Hybrid car. I love this thing. I also recently came across a great article about people hacking the engines to make 'em electric-only (for short distances) and plugging them in at night (which you normally can't do) to get even better mileage. Crazy.

3. Composting. Yes. Although I always seem to move houses just as the heap is turning into good stuff. The local solid waste authority gives away compost, too. I've used that before -- it works. I bought compost bins, big black ones, from them before, but now am just using a half-buried, bottom-cut-off garbage can, and it seems to be even more efficient.

20:54 / 05.07.05

London has made things very easy to re-cycle. Islington has just introduced compost waste for the kitchen- we were just about to get a compost stack for our garden- maybe still will but I certainly feel less guilty. We also recycle bottles, cans plastic bottles papers etc.

We now have a ban on new carrier bags in the house , cos they are very very bad for the environment as they are very hard to recycle- we have re-usable sainsbury's bags and thats it- i get shouted at if i bring other bags home and the habit has largely been broken- i actually get a little appalled by shop workers asking if i want a bag for one item that i can happily carry home in my bag.

I personally hate Biological washing powders, they can never be properly broken down and create the nasty scum that you see on the edge of beaches... and i'm very allergic which is another reason.

We also use ecover products and order a large proprtion of our vegatables from Able and Cole- organic seasonal food- yum! and not as expensive as you'd think, and not wrapped in the ridiculous packaging that supermarkets use on Organic produce.

so yes i guess i do recycle and try to be a bit greener- and i'm vaguely proud...

Tryphena Absent

21:09 / 05.07.05

Ecover do a biological washing powder that degrades properly.

This thread was actually inspired by my Ecover addiction, most washing up liquids and cleaning fluids leave my hands in a really bad state and marigold gloves aren't much better but I don't react to Ecover products at all. Today I bought Ecover toilet cleaner, it was quite exciting. So I currently have multisurface cleaner, washing up liquid, toilet cleaner and ecosquirt. It's absurd to be addicted to cleaning products but well, that's what it is and you can use them for everything including the windows. Lush.

Apparently Camden council are offering compost bins for £5. I want one but I don't know if I can train the menfolk to use them, it's bad enough with tins, I might go mad if there's another thing they forget to do.

21:16 / 05.07.05

I recycle, and try my best to be domestically ecological - like switching the television off rather than having it on stand-by, and using greener products. However, my housemate, like some doctor who smokes, was an environmentalist and dismisses it all as a load of bollocks, before switching on all the house lights and chucking away everything, or something, probably.

21:44 / 05.07.05

read a small piece the other day that 95% of australian households recycle.

we have two bins for the garbos to collect - one weekly with non-recyclable refuse, the other fortnightly for recycling [glass, plastic, paper, metal].

our household also composts vegetable waste from the kitchen and we use supermarket bags (when we get them, mostly we take our own) as bin liners. I have been recycling for a while; before household recycling was introduced a decade or so back, i used to hoard bottles and boxes and paper (when i could) and drop them off in public recycling stations.

Psi-L is working in hell

21:50 / 05.07.05

I recycle most household waste, though less now that I don't have a garden...when I was composting too I found I produced hardly any non-recyclable waste at all. I also use eco-friendly products for cleaning the house, mostly Ecover, though I actually find that their multi-purpose cleaners/bathroom cleaners are not as good as the ones from Earth Friendly Products.

I've also recently become more concerned about all the chemicals we put on and in our bodies too, and that ultimately get washed down the plughole so am now trying to use natural versions of products like toothpaste, shampoo etc, but it is still so incredibly expensive. Anyone found a cheap solution to this yet, that doesn't involve not washing?

22:28 / 05.07.05

Recycling is so easy here - it's almost easier than throwing something away with the garbage. All week long we just chuck everything recyclable into one big plastic crate, put it out on Sunday for pickup. We don't have to separate or condense anything. Which at times makes me worry that it's actually just going to the landfill... but once it leaves the curb it's a bit out of my control.

Other than that, I have to admit I don't do much else eco-friendly. We use a lot of paper products in our house (towels, napkins) - my boyfriend is the worst, ripping through paper towels like they're going out of style. At least I got him to use smaller, thinner paper napkins when possible. But I/we don't buy any recycled paper goods because of the price. When you're on the budget the couple of dollars extra really does matter.

I have always hated air conditioning on principle (cool down a room, warm up the atmosphere) but also I hate the feel of it. I always lobby to keep it off. But on 95 degree days when the humidity's through the roof, even I buckle. It's just now July and we've already had several days that were so unbearable all we could do is lie on the bed in the AC'd room all day. Ah, global warming.

00:33 / 06.07.05

We don't have to separate or condense anything. Which at times makes me worry that it's actually just going to the landfill...

yeah, ibis, we don't separate and i was worried, too... but we have a system that uses three laser sorting sections and they dump the lot into a separator that uses lasers to check whether it is paper, glass or what not, and then glass into brown, green or clear, so it is all separated. none of it goes to landfill that can be recycled.

dunno what other places use to get this separation.

we won a couple of movie tickets a few years back when we had to separate manually our end for being good at it. thought everyone got them, but found out only a handful of people per suburb were so rewarded. we was chuffed! (of course, s.o. takes full credit, and we still argue!

)

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

06:33 / 06.07.05

I stopped recycling for a while after seeing the local recycling bins getting chucked, all together, into the back of a normal rubbish truck with the rest of the crap. (Strangely, I seem to recall Michael Moore saying much the same thing about the US). After a while I started again, (although walking up to the bins every few days with an entire binliner full of empty beer cans is always an embarrassing experience) hoping that it's just SOME binmen who are too lazy to do it properly.
It did really piss me off, though.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

06:34 / 06.07.05

Hmm.. the separation thing's interesting, though... although I figure the way it's set up here that may not be what they use, because they have different bins for different coloured glass/paper/etc.

ONLY NICE THINGS

06:56 / 06.07.05

It's so easy, even if you don't get a collection all you need is a few stack boxes and the location of a good recycling centre.

And a car, which leads on to all sorts of interesting questions about the balancing of emissions...

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:14 / 06.07.05

Sorry, that's uppermost in my mind at the mometn primarily because not having a car makes recycling some things a lot trickier. It's also on my mind because I'm thinking of moving, which would stimulate the disposal of a large number of possessions. Computers in particular are an absolute bugger - I have dozens of old PCs, printers, peripherals etc that need to be taken somewhere and reclaimed, or sent to a developing country, and that involves logistical, organisational and practical resources I lack - it'll be both time-consuming and expensive to replace.

So, lots of my possessions are currently being parcelled up - what I can I'm trying to give to friends, then what remains to charity, then what charity doesn't want to disposal, but keeping things out of landfills is going to take time and money. Ah, well.

More generally.... recycle cardboard, paper and glass, paper probably being the worst of these. I'm trying to favour foods packaged in card over foods packaged in plastic (which makes them wierdly more expensive). Things I can't recycle I usually try to keep until I _can_ recycle. There's a bin for plastics by the NFT - I must try to find out if they recycle pastic bottles, or just keep them separate from stuff they _do_ recycle. I use Ecover cleaning products - laundry, dishes and bathroom - not exclusively, but I get around that by never cleaning.

09:45 / 06.07.05

Hear hear for the car issue. Burning irreplacable hydrocarbons and contributing to air pollution in order to recycle paper (which is biodegradable and sustainable) seems a bit pyrrhic to me. Because I hate cars... but that's another issue for another thread.

10:10 / 06.07.05

We recycle, watch our energy consumption, and use eco-friendly cleaning products, the only problem is getting reasonably priced refills.

Nowhere in Brighton seems to offer refills for anything less than the asking price of buying a new bottle.

Waarngghh.

10:35 / 06.07.05

Tower Hamlets has a recycling scheme for blocks and there are at least two sets of bins within 5 minutes of the hour. It is harder to get rid of batteries, dead computer bits, etc. So we recycle glass, tins, paper and cardboard, and textiles. No facility for plastics yet - most annoying - and there's no composting facility. It breaks my heart to have to put all those perfectly good peelings in the bin.

I use Ecover mostly, though I clean my mirrors with vinegar. I did go through a stint of using bicarb in the bathroom, but then decided that I couldn't get it as clean as with Ecover. I might just have been being lazy.

We get an organic box which we collect (and which comes to the collection point from Stokey by bike, hurrah, and is generally very focussed on reducing food miles).

I buy my lunch from the organic food bar but they dole stuff out into plastic containers and that makes me sad. I save them sometimes but there are only so many small plastic tubs a girl needs.

I feel a bit uncertain about the value of the council recycling schemes (like Stoatie). I read recently in Private Eye about Cleanaway (rubbish contractors) employees having been seen chucking recycling in the with the other rubbish. The Cleanaway boss/PR guy responded that it was the residents' fault for contaminating the recycling with regular waste, but since the binmen hadn't been checking this seems unlikely. I've seen Cleanaway vans in our street, so... doesn't inspire much confidence.

The other nasty I heard about recycling was that a lot of plastic material is sold off cheaply to Chinese industry, who need cheap resources (because of their massive expansion, IIRC). So plastic waste put out for recycling ends up going half way round the world in ships which aren't really envrionmentally sound... I don't think that's what the recyclers at this end really intend to happen.

10:38 / 06.07.05

5 minutes of the hour? 5 minutes of the house.

11:25 / 06.07.05

Haus:

"Computers in particular are an absolute bugger - I have dozens of old PCs, printers, peripherals etc that need to be taken somewhere and reclaimed, or sent to a developing country, and that involves logistical, organisational and practical resources I lack - it'll be both time-consuming and expensive to replace."

Ooh, you might find Freecycle useful.

It's a Yahoo group thing - you sign up for the one that covers your local area, post a message giving details of what it is you want to give away and if anyone else on the list wants it they email you and arrange to pick it up.

12:41 / 06.07.05

You crazy kids... recycling is one of those things we're always a bit sheepish about because we *say* we're going to do more and then it never quite happens, and then lo! this thread has inspired me.

As we're about to move house, we've ordered one of those green boxes from our new council (no such boxes were available for our old one), so hopefully that'll take care of the glass & paper. I've also been shopping for Ecover products. I'd never even heard of them before. *blush*

Any other suggestions for the wannabe planet-savers of central London (who have no car and no garden and a limited budget)? What about those crazy energy efficient lightbulbs about which I hear rumours? Is there anything to be done with plastic? Spread your wisdom...

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:52 / 06.07.05

Saveloy - ah yes! I joined with this in mind, but had forgotten. Cheers.

I'm replacing lightbulbs with low-energy lightbulbs as they go - I might leave them in when I leave, rather than swapping them back, in the hope of inspiring good habits. They're pretty cheap these days, as well - Robert Dyas usually has a bulk sale offer on - and they do last for much longer, especially in the London world of dodgy electrics...

13:02 / 06.07.05

When I lived in the London Borough of Ealing, we had kerbside recycling of everything bar plastic. The council made it incredibly easy to do - you were given a single green recycling box for glass, tins, paper, cardboard, etc. But the number of people who used their recycling box for other uses, chucking their "recyclables" into black bags for landfill, really made me angry.

The council then introduced plastic recycling for all types of plastic at various points around the borough. Although this was convenient, the scheme was run by a private company and I then heard that all the waste was shipped off to the far east as mentioned by someone else above. Why do we have to use so much plastic? Why milk in a tetrapak or plastic container and not a glass bottle? Why can't we make supermarkets charge 10p or something per plastic bag and force them to take back and recycle all the pointless packaging they wrap round fruit and veg?

Now that I live in windy Edinburgh, I'm toying with the idea of putting a wind turbine on my house. Not sure of the actual cost yet but a domestic scale turbine should be available later this year. Cheaper than solar....

We use Ecover products. The shower gel is great (but expensive). I just wish their fill-up-your-own-bottle scheme was more widely available. Been known to use bicarb and vinegar too....

13:12 / 06.07.05

Haus, how do you know that my car doesn't run on LPG?

I understand about the car thing but when you live in the middle of nowhere like me and there aren't any buses and you are not near a train station it's really impossible not to drive places. I guess I could cycle, but cycling 35 miles to work is a long old haul, I'd have to leave at sily o'clock in the morning, and what would I do about the lovely boy?

If there was an alternative solution I'd gladly take it up.

There are some things you can do to drive in a more environmentally friendly fashion, like not hammering your car and not braking hard.

Converting your car to LPG is expensive; it would cost me £1,700. I'd halve my fuel bill so I'd get it back eventually but the initial outlay is a lot. I think you used to be able to get a grant to do it...

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:26 / 06.07.05

Haus, how do you know that my car doesn't run on LPG?

Because you just told me, Lula. Before then, I was playing probabilities, you're right, but it was not an unreasonable assumption...

Which is kind of the point - recycling is not a worthwhile act in and of itself, per se - it's a worthwhile act insofar as it reduces the impact of the individual on the environment. If the damage you do to the environment on the way to recycling is greater than the benefit gained from recycling, the answer is not to recycle, and to concentrate instead on minimising waste at the front end, in which terms having very little rubbish is much more impressive and useful.

There are decisions one makes about whether or not to own a car more generally, and they involve sacrifices and benefits to the person and to the environment - if you want to live in the countryside, it's very hard to do it without owning a car, in which case you then have to consider the environmental cost of car ownership and ways to minimise it.

13:28 / 06.07.05

Brunner, how exciting. You want one of these mini Windsave turbines. And you also want to read this article on choosing a turbine.

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:50 / 06.07.05

Those _rock_. I really want to buy somewhere now, in order to be able to put in solar panels and turbines until it looks like a giant robot sex hedgehog... renting is, predictably, really energy-inefficient.

paranoidwriter waves hello

14:03 / 06.07.05

I also worry about the negation of recycling efforts such as the examples already mentioned. e.g. Stoatie's comments about Hackney's refuse collection, shipping plastic to China, etc. And I agree the cost and seemingly endless game of Green Living makes things harder (I'm no angel either, I assure you). But I guess the point is to keep trying anyway in the hope that our actions will be seen and noted, and that eventually the infrastructure and heads of local recycling schemes (etc) will be forced to sort themselves out because of this. "The power is in the prol's", and all that, no?

Mind you, I saw a "log maker" on the web-site I mentioned earlier and for ages I thought "what a great idea!", until my friend pointed out that burning shed loads of old paper containing dyes and bleaches etc is probably not a good thing.

Hmm.. what does everyone else think about all this? Am I straying into the stuff of another thread?

14:52 / 06.07.05

Paranoidwriter, I think that you should use your log maker for newspaper (anything without coloured ink) and then recycle or compost the rest.

With regard to paper manufacture F.O.E say "Newsprint is cheap, often contains a high proportion of recycled fibre with little or no additives and is of low strength and quality. Brightness requirements for newsprint are low and can therefore be easily and cheaply achieved without chlorine. Recent development of colour printing technology has led to demand for a slightly higher quality product, but of all paper product categories newsprint is still potentially the most benign in environmental terms.

So I think that that can apply to burning it too.

F.O.E. obviously agree since they recommend the logmaker in their 50+ top tips for cutting waste, so unless your friend is a big noise in environmental issues I would go by what F.O.E say, rather than rumour and hearsay.

Haus, I've got a little book called 52 weeks to change your world and it's really good. You can start off with really simple things and then gradually move up the scale of brain strain.

One day the beautiful man and I are going to build our own autonomous house. We have already started planning it. It might take us a lot longer than 52 weeks to start, but we are going to do it. I highly recommend the Ecohouse 2 book for anyone interested in such things.

Starting off small is all you can do unless you're rather well-off. I, for instance, am saving up to convert my car but it's going to be a while before I can afford it.

Doing just a bit might not mean a great deal at first but as you add more things, it does become worth it and I think any attempt to try and change things is a good one. Yes, if you take your recycling to the centre in a car then that's not ideal, but if you take your Mum's as well (like I do) and do it on the way to somewhere else (for example work, as I do) then at least you're using your journey efficiently and not making a trip just to recycle.

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