Recycling – Why make it such a chore?

We all know recycling is a good thing to do and I want to show my kids to be responsible. Why do some councils make it such a chore to do it.

Many areas have different coloured wheelie bins so you can put the rubbish to be recycled outside and on collection day, just put bin out and job done. That’s too straightforward and logical for our area. We have a plastic tub, a plastic bag, a sack, and food caddy. Any other items suitable for recycling that doesn’t go in those are to be put out for recycling in carrier bags (!?).

Ignoring for a moment the complexity of what goes where , lets start with the 2 big issues with the containers themselves .

1) On many recycle collection days once emptied if there is any wind about, they need to be chased down the road, or we end up doing a hunt looking for them after work and not always finding every container – like a treasure hunt without a map or a good prize at the end!

2) Recycling needs to be left inside until morning of collection day. In bags and open top containers,  plastics go into a bag, so ends up scattered everywhere if left outside by any breeze. Paper and cardboard is also put in open tubs or bags so any weather you end up either with a bag of mush or it all over the place.

Now I have seen those day time telly programmes about councils mat leave and feeding baby meant hours of day time telly and recycling in contamination comes up a lot. So making what goes into what container doesn’t make sense.

The food container I totally get .

In the plastics container,  which is a sack is fairly straight forward plastics and cans can be recycled although all lids for bottles are to be unscrewed and placed in separately – although I am still perplexed to how to keep a bottle squashed without the lid on

The cardboard is a little ambiguous . If it’s thick cardboard – seems to be some cereal boxes and paper wrappers are classed as thick and some thin, any sort of corrugation or brown cardboard it goes in with the glass bottles,  which is a black box not unlike a storage box you can buy but no lid , if it’s thin card or tetra pak (which some things classed as thick card is thinner than the paks) goes in with paper in a green plastic bag.

So with the prospect of Ro being mobile shortly, I could no longer put up with part of my kitchen looking like a recycling plant by the end of the week, I had to get some lidded tubs to store them inside.

Recycling is a great thing but no wonder they have had to run incentives to get people to recycle.