Non-recycleable plastic

[ferrit worrier]

Just chatting about the old days with Mrs Mick F and reminiscing about the mine shafts.
Also, toothpaste.
It used to come in metal tubes that you rolled up as you used it. These days, you can't get all the toothpaste out, and as they can't be recycled they are landfill and will remain in there for eons. At least in the old days, the tubes would rust away in landfill within a few years.

Even the Romans chucked stuff down old mine shafts .
https://www.derbyscc.org.uk/alderley/cu ... logy_1.php
Thats me holding the pot of 500 plus coins about an hour after I found them. And in the lower picture thats me in the blue t shirt

[661-Pete]

When I were a lad I deliverd groceries on a bike wiv a baskit on't front . That were 50 year ago

Ha!! Outed!

[ferrit worrier]

When I were a lad I deliverd groceries on a bike wiv a baskit on't front . That were 50 year ago

Ha!! Outed!

How did I guess that was coming not me anyroad a never wore a cap . The bikes pretty similar, spoon handle brakes on pull rods. Or a shoe pushed between the front wheel and the forks. Go on how many oldies on here have played that game. Apologies Mick weve got a bit of topic here.

[NUKe]

We need to put it all in a rocket and dump it all on the Moon or send it off into deepest space, or dig a big deep hole and chuck it in.

We be over burdened the earth with crap, now you want to cover the moon. Apart from the cost of getting anything off the earth, energy wise we already have enough problems with space junk.
[emoji24]
As for great big holes er that’s what we did for most of the last century and most of em are full.

We over package we don’t recycle nearly enough, nothing is built to last.
The mantra should be reduce reuse and recycle.



NUKe

[Mick F]

As for great big holes er that’s what we did for most of the last century and most of em are full.

Dig another one then, even deeper.

[[XAP]Bob]

We don’t, and can’t be expected to know.
This is partly because every area does it differently - there is no ‘standard’ anywhere.

Personally I think we should have a ‘clean waste’ bin and a ‘dirty waste’ bin... one headed for landfill/incineration, the other to be sorted professionally and recycled/reused or sent on for landfill/incineration.

[kwackers]

Personally I think we should have a ‘clean waste’ bin and a ‘dirty waste’ bin... one headed for landfill/incineration, the other to be sorted professionally and recycled/reused or sent on for landfill/incineration.

Personally I think the goal should be to have no landfill waste at all. I find it bizarre that we use any form of packaging that can't be either recycled or burnt (cleanly).

Same thing for general goods, without good reason anything you buy should be easily recyclable. There should be a charge at point of sale that covers the cost of recycling stuff - point of sale, not at disposal. (Tax at point of disposal is why there are old sheds up and down the country full of old tyres just waiting for an 'accidental' fire.)

[Mick F]

I think we should unwrap stuff at the checkouts and leave the rubbish for them to dispose of.
Give it six months - providing most shoppers do it - and the problem would be gone.

[mjr]

the thing with plastic is how do we know what is recyclable and what isnt?

In West Norfolk, it's the plastics with the numbers 1, 2, 4 or 5 in the little recycling triangle - I think that's HDPE, LDPE, PP and PS (not EPS) but maybe not in that order. Nothing else is acceptable, which leaves a heck of a lot of stuff going to landfill or incineration. The current WRAP markings on packaging which say things like "Check Local Recycling" without saying what plastic it actually is are useless and should be improved.

I think there should be compulsory marking of council bins with what recycling symbols can go into each one, including marking the landfill bill with the symbols of the stuff the council doesn't recycle. That would remind people of how government is failing us every time they see their bins - so of course I doubt it will ever happen.

[ambodach]

I have 6 separate rubbish containers. General non recyclable,paper,metal,plastic,glass plus my own compost bins which get everything organic. Most paper goes to compost but not cardboard. The uplift timetable gets a bit complicated but it all seems to work. One problem is that not all plastic can be recycled so someone has to sort it later.

[[XAP]Bob]

I think we should unwrap stuff at the checkouts and leave the rubbish for them to dispose of.
Give it six months - providing most shoppers do it - and the problem would be gone.

The problem is getting even a minority of shoppers to do it.

in France we always seem to weigh our own veg and and put a price label on. There is no issue then at the checkout in terms of visibility, since the price label is there. Of course this relies on the honesty of shoppers, but doesn't any self checkout system rely on the same?

The convenience of picking up a bag of carrots is useful, but if I couldn't at least give them a visual inspection then I might not. So prepackaged paper bags don't seem like a good idea. Maybe I could just pick some from the basket and put them in a bag myself...

[Graham]

I have the impression that the entire WASTE System is now overwhelmed and unable to cope.
No plastic exports to China was the final straw that has blown the system apart.

In summary, our society, produces far more stuff than it can reasonably deal with.

Society is unwilling to pay the true, full cost of dealing with the situation.

The externalisation* is beginning to unwind and we are now seeing the inconvenient truth.

The usual policies of inertia & delay will only compound the problem.

* Pass it on down the system and forget about it.

Have a nice day

[Mick F]

We have two bins in the kitchen.
One for non recyclable and one for recyclable. Bottles and glass jars etc go in a crate in the porch.
When they are full, they get disposed of - bottles etc go to the bottle bank, and the plastic bottles and tin cans etc go to their respective banks.
Non recycling goes into a black bin-bag and is collected from the gate on a Wednesday morning.

Paper and cardboard get turned into hot water in our fires - one in the kitchen and one in the lounge.
Magazines - if we have any at all - go to the health centre or the dentist.
We don't buy newspaper so we have to import it from one of the local pubs. We line the parrot cage with it, and when it's finished with, it gets turned into hot water.

Veg peelings and garden waste goes in the compost bins.

[661-Pete]

I think we should unwrap stuff at the checkouts and leave the rubbish for them to dispose of.
Give it six months - providing most shoppers do it - and the problem would be gone.

Even - say - meat? Minced meat? Where would you put it? In your pocket?

But I agree where it comes to unnecessary packaging - unnecessary to the consumer that is. A lot of it is there to facilitate transport. For example, toothpaste tubes come in rectangular cardboard boxes (which are recyclable). They do it that way because you can't neatly stack up toothpaste-tube-shaped objects in a shipping container.

I have noticed something at the loose fish counter (Waitrose). They now tend to wrap the fish in only one plastic bag. Previously they would use up to three bags, each one inside the next. New instructions from High Up, perhaps? The type of bags used for this are of course, unarguably non-recyclable - but we do re-use them to put the fish heads, bones and guts in - before they go into the landfill. For that sort of waste I can't see any alternative. Even home-based wormeries can't cope with everything. And flies are a perennial problem...

[Mick F]

I think we should unwrap stuff at the checkouts and leave the rubbish for them to dispose of.
Give it six months - providing most shoppers do it - and the problem would be gone.

Even - say - meat? Minced meat? Where would you put it? In your pocket?

I don't know about you or other folk, but we use reusable shopping bags and boxes. We have plastic food bags we could take to put stuff in, or better still paper bags and grease proof paper.

Fruit and veg should be loose and unbagged.

We don't buy meat from a supermarket anyway, but prefer to get it from a real butcher. We buy mince in perhaps 3lbs lumps and it's wrapped in a single bio-degradeable plastic bag. At home, we weigh it in meal-sized portions, then freeze it, again in bio-degradeable plastic bags.

Meat in supermarkets come in black polystyrene trays and shrink-wrap - not recycleable in the slightest and is a national disgrace that they do.