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Recycled rubbish going into landfill!
Just to inflame the anti Daily Mail lobby.... 
As long as glass goes to one landfill, cardboard to another....
Now to see if my wife will let me get away with throwing an empty baked bean tin in the bin..... :eek:
As long as glass goes to one landfill, cardboard to another....
Now to see if my wife will let me get away with throwing an empty baked bean tin in the bin..... :eek:
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Story from 2008:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/scandal-of-recycled-rubbish-ending-up-335136
It would appear the Daily Mail is just recycling old news.
The non-recyclable batch then just has to get dumped.
I can see that, but do they really need to transport it halfway around the world in order to dump it - wouldn't it be more environmentally friendly to dump it in the UK?
Ok, we will dump it where you live, I'm sure you won't raise any objections to the planning permission to site a dump next to your house.
So its all right to dump it next to some poor sods house in China then? - you made the rubbish you take care of it, dont export it to foreign countries so that it is out of sight, out of mind.
I can remember my mum washing out the milk bottles for them to be re-used. Even juice bottles were re-used.
Mad isn't it? It's going to cause the same environmental damage regardless of where it's dumped, except transporting it abroad *adds* to the environmental damage.
But in terms of overall cost it's cheaper to pay for our crap to be sent to China where workers over there can sort it on £1 a day wages.
The current state of world economics is choking the planet. Still, as long as someone somewhere is making a nice healthy profit who cares?
I suspect a large proportion of the rubbish originated in China, so yeah, it seems fair.
Haha. That's an interesting point. Perhaps we should have a policy of "rubbish should be dumped where it originated".
The whole of China would be knee deep in rubbish in a decade
Indeed, and it's all done in the misguided notion that it is somehow 'saving the planet', and so are all those 'green taxes' that make everything so bl**dy expensive. The whole thing's a crock.
I wanted to get of a pile of old papers. My local recycling centre doesn't take paper. Apparently I have to put it in my recycle bin. Problem is, I'm not supposed to put shredded paper in my recycle bin. My paper was shredded because it was old bills, bank statements etc.
So I burnt it in my garden instead.
I do the same thing. Around 9 or 10 years ago I phoned my local newspaper to ask them to print a warning regarding putting unshredded documents in the bags left out for collection. I explained the reason as being that in the next town, immigrants were going through them in the very early hours of the morning for the purpose of ID fraud. They said they couldn't do anything unless it was sanctioned by the local council. So I phoned the council and explained the position to them and I explained that the adjoining town council had become aware and the matter had been publicised in the local paper, which happened to be a sister paper to the one I'd approached. The council asked what I would suggest they could do other than include a warning in the next quarterly council magazine, you know, the one that hardly anyone reads. I said "Oh FFS" and slammed the phone down.
It's probably only a small minority of waste management companies that behave in this way and it can be solved by better contract monitoring by local authorities and by immediate contract termination which will serve as an industry-wide disincentive to bad practice.
As for the Mail, there is an ulterior motive here. They're out to discredit all things green and environmental and this is part of their agenda.
My local council (Wandsworth in London) provide transparent orange plastic bags for recyclable waste. Tins, plastic bottles, paper and cardboard packaging all go in. But put a piece of expanded polystyrene into it and the binmen will leave the whole bag. It's crazy.
We have a local bottle bank. There's one bin for brown bottles, one for green, another for clear glass, and so on, and people turn up with plastic bags full of glass bottles and sort them out into the correct bins. So you can imagine my annoyance when coming home late one night I saw the bottle banks being emptied; craned up on a HIAB, the bottoms opened and all the glass, of whatever colour, dropped into a tipper lorry. All the sorting is just a con to make people feel they're doing something for the environment.
Don't get the idea that I'm against recycling. On the contrary, I'm all for it. We're running out of resources and I don't fancy wading around knee-deep in rubbish. But I am dead against local authorities playing these sorts of tricks to pay lip service to it instead of doing the job properly.
These days emissions from energy from waste plants have to comply with EU directives and so that issue is a thing of the past. Countries with high environmental standards, such as Sweden, employ these technologies to both dispose of waste and to provide electrical and heat energy, e.g. district heating.
We are do currently have more than enough incinerator capacity, is talk of building more but the lack of available 'fuel' for them doesn't justify building em unless we do even less recycling than now ... targets are to recycle more
Totally agree. The whole "green" thing is a huge scam to raise money. I don't recycle a bloody thing, and I never will.
If it was such a concern how come we don't use milk bottles and pop bottles over and over like we used to? And don't even get me started on supermarkets selling shrink wrapped Swedes ffs...and what about Government buildings lit up like Christmas trees at night? All bollocks as you say.
The amount of reusable items that I collect seperately over the course of a week is just ridiculous and seems like such wasteful practice by the retailers.:(:rolleyes:
down to cost probably & weight --- plastic bottles very cheap to make & weigh far less than glass for transportation.
So cost outweighs environmental concerns then? See this is where I have a problem being preached at by green nutters. I seem to remember they used a thermal imaging camera at night on Al Gore's house in the States and it glowed like bloody Hiroshima in 1945. It's a classic case of "do as I say, not as I do".
Yes this does my head in too. It used to be OK to put shredded paper in Hammersmith & Fulham recycling bags but at some point in the last year or two they changed the rules and said that shredded paper must go in the black bag landfill waste.
I agree that most greenwash is a scam but in the specific case of milk bottles there is of course an energy cost in both collecting them back up again / returning them to the depot, and in washing them out (leave aside the financial cost of this for now). It is possible that this energy cost does actually exceed the energy / material cost of plastic milk cartons, especially the transport part, given how much heavier a glass milk bottle is.