Post by Sam PlusnetOur LA uses large woven plastic bags for a range of materials, including
a blue one for cardboard.
Over the years our bag started to fall apart due to hard use - so we
asked for, & received, a replacement.
Then it was a question of "What do we do with the old one?"
The obvious answer was to recycle it.
We put it into the appropriate container.
The bin men carefully removed it from the container, and returned it to
us...
Rinse and repeat.
It is apparently impossible to recycle a recycling container.
LOL
It is so much easier in our area (East Yorkshire) because *all*
recycling (glass, hard plastic, paper/cardboard, tin cans) goes in a
single (blue) bin and does not have to be kept separate inside the house
and then put into separate bins/bags for roadsider collection.
The only thing that is kept separate is food waste and garden rubbish
which both go in a brown bin. That works in our favour because the food
waste *had* to be collected every fortnight, and now *has* to be
collected every week under a new Government scheme, so the side effect
of that is that we get weekly collections of garden waste all year
round. And we got them all through Covid.
The East Yorkshire scheme gets high levels of recycling (and low levels
of landfill) because it is so easy and is not micro-managed. It should
become the national model for all councils.
I still have to take excess garden waste to the tip at times when we do
a lot of pruning, but even that is under cover: you drive up a ramp to
the first-floor of huge a covered shed and then tip the garden waste,
cardboard, wood, metal etc into separate skips at ground floor level. It
pongs a bit in a hot summer, but at least you never get wet when it's
raining, and you don't have to climb steps to reach the top of each skip.
Where we lived before (North Yorkshire) we had a tatty "plastic-hessian"
bag for cardboard, but it was so small that you had to rip cardboard
boxes into small pieces - you couldn't just rip the edges of the box and
put each side in whole. Cans and bottles were in a plastic crate with an
ill-fitting lid which usually blew off in the wind, allowing the
contents to blow all over the road.
One way to improve recycling further would be to remove the requirement
to wash bottles/cans/foil trays before recycling. When I've finished
with something, it becomes rubbish that I want to get rid of and it is a
real pain to try to find space in the dishwasher for bottles and trays -
or to wash them by hand. Those things tend to go into landfill on the
basis of "too f-ing hard to comply with the rules".