I am happy with the concept, religiously sort according to council instructions.
Then, I got thrown by some recent “news” items and allegations.
The first was an explanation why lids are now attached to bottles. Tops were simply dropped and the user then walks away using the bottle. Keeping them attached increases the chance of recycling. Then, came the “but”, apparently in the recycling process there is a seive and pieces smaller than 50mm fall through and do not get processed.
This led to a conversation about metal recycling, allegedley small pieces are a problem, making the effort to cut the ring of metal left on a bottle when the screw cap is removed is a waste of time. Then, being told that aluminium foil wrappers need to be amalgamated, screwed into a ball, possibly fist size. The thought of trying to store pieces to get to a ball this size from using Oxo cubes!
Then yesterday, one of those possibly pieces of fake news because there was no source, or even country of attribution, 70% of plastic collected ends up being burnt.
Does anyone have any knowledge of the processes?
Recycling in the UK is the responsibility of local councils, and each one has been tasked with setting up collection facilities suited to their own resources, so they are different all over the UK. Advice from others here could therefore be entirely inappropriate to you.
I read something similar. It related solely to the plastic put in the flexible plastic bins that you find in the supermarkets. Most is sent abroad for processing and it’s very low value stuff. It’s very hard to separate the materials in some instances, such as crisp packets. About 30% gets recycled, and other chunk is made into new things such as plastic garden benches, and the rest is burned to generate energy. All three options are better than landfill and there is no reason to stop doing it. Not buying the plastic in the first place will always be the best thing to do: not buying water in plastic bottles, buying loose fruit and veg, getting products from refill ships etc. anything to reduce the plastic in the ground, in the rivers and the sea, and lying around in our open spaces because idiots are too stupid to take it home.
I think with all the effort talked about here it’s time that other countries and nations did their bit. 
Recycling seems to be a ‘wonder solution’ allowing for huge amounts of waste to be generated. The waste is fine because it’s recyclable - yes? Er no.
If you haven’t bought it then you don’t need to recycle it!
I was surprised to learn that the District Council we have moved into helpfully recycled paper and cardboard in seperate wheely bin.
However, not paper shredding which is too small, jams machinery and is easily set alight.
Solution is put in plastic bag, in dirty bin which is then incinerated.
Having said that not having food waste festering in a brown bin is much better.
I didn’t think the local council actually did the recycling. I recall seeing a documentary where domestic metal, that is food and drinks cans were passed through a shredder, the result was then passed on a conveyer belt under electromagnets to separate steel from aluminium. The recent conversation seemed to suggested that if I put a 15mm diameter bottle top in my metal recycling box it is too small to be recycled, so my interest is what happens once it leaves the council.
This is a fun one, for a long time the local council would not accept shredded paper. Now they do as long as it is in a clear tie top plastic bag. I have seen ours put in the paper/card section of the lorry. But, if I put out a pile of newspapers in a plastic carrier bag, they tip the papers into the lorry and return the bag to the recycling box.
I have long thought there should be a very simple system. 26 letters of the alphabet so use them e.g A= Cardboard, B=Tin, C= etc. Etc. And perhaps Z for non recyclable. Then the entire country has bins with the letters to make it simple to use and understand
Also, I find it hard to believe supermarkets can’t use biodegrable packaging for example apples in plastic. You should be able to just put that into the compost bin where it rots down after a month or two
I think I’ve mentioned this before but I’m deeply cynical about recycling targets as there is no real incentive to reduce unnecessary packaging as this will reduce the percentage of recyclable vs non-recyclable waste.
If you had 30% non-recyclable waste and 70% recyclable it looks good if you recycle close to 70%.
Reduce that 70% of recyclable packaging significantly and it negatively affects the recycling stats.
[quote="catswhiskers, post:1, topic:36972, full:true”]
The first was an explanation why lids are now attached to bottles. Tops were simply dropped and the user then walks away using the bottle. Keeping them attached increases the chance of recycling. Then, came the “but”, apparently in the recycling process there is a seive and pieces smaller than 50mm fall through and do not get processed.
[/quote]
That’s interesting, so the driver was this sieving process not the fact that litter louts chucked them away which they’d probably do with the whole bottle anyway?
This one measure really annoys me as it’s made the bottle tops harder to open and in the case of larger bottles you want to re-close it’s much harder to screw the top back on, especially with a bit of arthritis. I religiously tear the top off these days when opening but always recycle on the bottle.
The other oddity I’m concerned about is the likely complete variability in cleaning the recyclable waste.
Any container which had food within from a milk bottle to a ready meal may have food residue or in extreme cases be full of rotten food.
How many people I wonder actually wash these items to remove food residue, and even then it’s often not 100% effective.
Does recycling continue irrespective of clean recyclables or if they’re ‘contaminated’? I have no idea.
Cleaning the packaging however might well counteract recycling benefits by using water and the energy to heat it, especially if things are put in a dishwasher to clean them!
So many of these ‘eco’ things are not as straightforward as they should be when you actually think about it.
Our tetrapaks are still not recyclable locally. I would take them to the supermarket, but worry that it would get the soft plastic load rejected. That’s an awful lot of tetrapaks for our region just going into landfill. I was taking the caps off at least, but now I see there is probably no point.
You are spot on.
The recycling companies want particular materials to recycle to make a profit.
Certain materials such as used engine oil is less cost effective so they restrict what you can take in - as I discovered and complained about.
I don’t know if it’s the same for the UK, but here in Ontario, Canada, all they really want is aluminium cans, or I suppose other aluminium items as well.
Apparently, 80% of the money they make comes from the aluminium and yet only 20% of what they bring in is aluminium. So all they really want is the aluminium, but they are obliged to process all of the things they collect.
I’m not sure it still happens, but for a while there, half the stuff they collected ended up at garbage dumps in some of the northern States and probably in Canada as well. I would think that still goes on as there are not many viable end uses for much of the collected items.
I wold think the situation is similar in the UK, as if one country developed a good use for way-too-much of a particular item, I’m sure the news would spread to other eager countries.
Yes, this exactly. I always have to educate, well politely suggest, to family members and such about rinsing out garbage. My supposed ‘eco friendly’ sister in law will take a plastic (polystyrene I guess) empty peanut butter container and wash and rinse it out so she can recycle it. It’s absurd … she uses 2 or 3 litres of hot, yes hot, water to clean it. Talk about wasting resources … Jeez mon.
We already flush our toilets with drinking water and I see people every weekend washing their cars and hosing down their driveways.
It’s about overall conservation and most people just don’t get it.
I am cynical , but work on the basis of whatever recyclable materials there are, I should make them available for recycling
Our council has an Executive Cycle where you can ask questions directly or in writing. It was invaluable in the campaign over the football pitch , to get the council to answer and then reply to it via our local newspaper
More can be done, when you see the plastics that are in the sea then I am very much in favour of attempting to recycle (even if it is as energy 
) rather than just putting it into landfill
Price Waterhouse Cooper published a study on the impact of the tethered bottle cap directive. There was apparently no impact assessment done/published prior to introducing the directive. In a nutshell:
. tethered caps could require more than 50,000 to 200,000 tonnes of additional plastic…This would reverse more than five years of progress made by industry in ‘light-weighting’ beverage bottles to reduce the plastic content
. introducing tethered caps would create up to 381 million kg of CO2 equivalent, corresponding to 244 million additional cars on the streets.
. disruption that would be caused to an estimated 1,350 bottling production lines across the European Union requiring a minimum of €2.7 billion costs (and up to €8.7 billion) to adapt bottling lines
It is important to note the study was commissioned by the European soft drinks industry (UNESDA) and European Federation of Bottled Waters (EFBW), so take from it what you will. That said, the industry wanted to work on initiatives to achieve 90% collection targets, already achieved apparently in Germany and Denmark.
Utterly incredible, I’m really struggling with these tops on my favourite low sugar lemonade.
It’s crazy, I just pull them straight off and have dropped more bottle caps doing that than I ever did before.