watervole | What people do with rubbish

What people do with rubbish

I'm always slightly bemused by the fact that Richard and I put out less than one bin bag of rubbish a week. The family over the road regularly put out eight bin bags. What on earth are they putting in them all?

Sure, we recycle. But our bottles tins and plastics only fill one green box per week. I wonder if the answer lies partly in kitchen waste. All of ours ends up in the compost heap. It doesn't exactly involve much effort -- we simply tip it into a small bin in the kitchen, and then to the small bin into the compost heap when it gets full. We do the same with grass cuttings and weeds.

I was amazed to discover that several neighbours whom I regard as keen gardeners don't compost anything. The lady over the road throws away her lawn clippings and then buys compost to improve her soil. Crazy!

I've now worked out a deal with several of the neighbours whereby instead of going to the tip to get rid of their lawn clippings, they give them to me. They leave a bin bag of lawn clippings on my doorstep and I use them to either mulch around plants or to add to my compost heap. Making compost is so diabolically easy, and the results are so self-evidently useful, that I really can't work out why everyone doesn't do it. All of the gardens around here have space for a Dalek style compost bin.

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I take in grass clippings too :-)

I think most of your neighbours throw out a lot of packaging, from processed food et al.?

Food packaging. We put out about a bag and a half a week. and I'd estimate about 75% at least is that.

We recycle plastic containers and glass ourselves, but we're not allowed to put paper food packaging in the regular collected paper bin. I don't wash up and re-use things like yoghourt cartons. We do all our shopping in one go at the supermarket over the weekend, but even if we bought veg at the organic greengrocers, meat at the butchers etc., a lot of it is packaged. And if you order take-away food, or buy anything frozen, it's even worse.

I suspect the rest of our rubbish is tobacco-related, or bathroom stuff like drug packaging. Because of the way we eat, there is very little food waste - tops and tails and peel, but no bones and rarely any leftover food.

I'm always slightly bemused by the fact that Richard and I put out less than one bin bag of rubbish a week. The family over the road regularly put out eight bin bags. What on earth are they putting in them all?

The thing with waste is that it's easy to just sling it and not worry about where it's going to end up. Some people just don't think.

Here in the student flats we have recycling bags in each kitchen for paper, plastics and metal - oddly PCC won't take glass which is crazy. When full they get emptied into skips in the yard. Now we need ~~one~~ several for glass - the nearest bottle bank is miles away.

My father puts his grass clippings in the green bin, but previously the'd be piled up on a bonfire and burnt periodically. Most other garden waste goes on there. Even that benefits the soil - the heat bakes the clay and breaks it up and the ashes fertilise the soil. Ash is also a good to put around plants to stop slugs and snails.

Your deal with the neighbours sounds a brilliant idea. Maybe you could sell them your excess compost. :-)

You may be right. We eat almost no processed food at all and we get an organic veg box for most of our veg (and the box is folded up and given back to them for reuse)

PS. I still hate that icon! Couldn't you just go for a still image of a breastfeeding woman?

Actually our bottles, Tins and Plastics usually only partially fill the green box.

Lawn clippings by themselves don't make good compost -- you need other organic matter to mix in with them. Though I'd have thought that someone who was a keen gardener would have other compostables from the garden, even if they don't have appropriate kitchen waste. Not everyone does -- if you buy a lot of pre-prepared food, there may be very little clean vegetable waste, and many people won't compost anything with meat content because it can attract rats.

At least here we have separate recycling bins for garden waste that can be composted, which goes to the council's composting centre to be turned into compost for the municipal landscaping. So even though I don't have anywhere to put a compost bin of my own, my garden waste gets used.

Yes, I only put a fraction of my grass cuttings in my compost bins, because previous experience suggests it swamps everything else with stickiness. Most of it goes in the green (garden waste) bin which the council collects once a fortnight.

We also have monthly collections for paper, glass and tins, but not plastic, annoyingly. I have stacks of yoghurt cartons building up in the hope that they will find a recycling outfit eventually, but no luck yet. I might try to get them in a bag to take up to my mother's, if I'm travelling light next time I go there. They have a plastic-recyling bin in the carpark.

I think food packaging is a great deal of the problem. I have less than average, because I prefer cooking fresh food, but it probably accounts for half of the small bag that goes into my black bin every week. A lot of the rest is envelopes, which they won't accept for recycling. Sometimes I shred them (after tearing out the plastic windows) to add to the compost.

I don't compost, but because I buy very little processed food and use a tote bag most of the time, our rubbish too fills maybe 12" of space in the 3' wheelie bin. Paper and glass goes in the green box but the council won't take plastic or cardboard.

The council takes garden waste (but not kitchen waste - they aren't allowed to take anything that might have had the remote possibility of coming into contact with raw meat) and composts it locally, so no one around here should be putting garden waste into the normal rubbish. Most is used on council land and the rest is sold as compost.

The biggest help to recycling recently has been Tesco. They now have a new recycling center that takes cardboard packaging and rigid plastics (among other things like glass and metal cans) both of which were very difficult to get recycled locally and means that I'm now managing to recycle a lot more that I was at the start of this year.

Our 'garden' doesn't have the space for a compost bin - but fortunately our council has a green waste collection (it's one of the councils that collects waste and recycling on alternate weeks - and as the recycling includes bottles, plastic, cardboard, paper and tins there really is very little to go in the fortnightly 'general' bin (mostly plastic packaging). I get so annoyed by people who go around complaining about fortnightly recycling - if you do it properly there shouldn't be that much non-recycling waste. (Our only big problem is used cat litter).

Agreed. Pure grass would make poor compost - very smelly. But it's a great mulch for keeping weeds down. And, as you say, most gardeners should have weeds and stuff to mix with it.

We're still waiting for garden waste recycling round here, though some areas have it already. It makes sense.

Mix the grass cuttings with shredded newspaper. That makes a big difference.

I put in various types of paper and cardboard; any vaguely confidential document I don't need any more ends up in there via the shredder. But I still wouldn't be able to use all the cuttings; there's too much grass even for the two bins on a regular basis. So the garden waste bin is a welcome extra.

I put out between half and 3/4 of a bin bag every week, sometimes a full bag every two weeks. I rarely have non-compostible food waste (cat food being the major component of such) and cardboard is composted. The bin contains plastics, snotty tissues, used cat litter (although I'm looking into flushable stuff) and envelopes. If I had more space I'd probably start storing and sorting the plastics but even our local recycling facility is very fussy about what it takes.

I think my rubbish output is low because I buy very few ready meals and I am very concious about not producing any food waste. After reading I'm very careful about over purchasing. (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shopped-Shocking-Power-British-Supermarkets/dp/0007158033)

Put Shopped in there. Silly missing tag. :)

I'm composting the snotty tissues as well!

I put out a black sack about two weeks out of every three. Mostly plastic bottles, cardboard, crisp packets, choccie wrappers and other food packaging, plus what little vegetable waste I generate (no garden, so can't compost). Also any food that's gone past its use-by date, which is probably my biggest sin. I keep bying packets of rice, lentils etc that sit around in a cupboard for a couple of years after being opened.

Volume-wise, the biggest component of my waste is glass and paper, both of which go to the recycling centre round the corner. The skip there will take paper, including window envelopes, but not cardboard. Unfortunately I'm in the kind of neighbourhood where too many people treat the waste paper skip as a general dumping spot, so it tends to be half full of all the things that it says very clearly shouldn't be put in there - textiles, plastic, garden waste.

Compost is wonderful (there's an Earth Day t-shirt for you). It is all that has rescued vestiges of our lawn. And the great part is, you can compost almost *anything*.

And the great part is, you can compost almost *anything*.

This reminds me of the story where an ecologist composts his murder victim.(Niven's _Footfall_ in case you're wondering).

lol - I remember it well.

He might have been a psychopathic murderer, but at least he was green.

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