Are you reasonably conscientious about recycling?

J

Josiah

Senior Member
Location
50 miles east of Cincinnati, OH
I know some of you may live in recycling friendly places and some of you may not. Where I live in small town southern Ohio there is very little consciousness of the recycling ethic. There use to be some recycling dumpsters at one end of the Walmart parking lot. The company responsible for emptying the dumpsters was very lax and most of the time the dumpsters were overflowing, People started leaving stuff everywhere and eventually Walmart arranged to have the operation ended. I still recycle but it involves driving into the outskirts of Cincinnati. It's a sad commentary about the absence of a sense of civic responsibility.
 

Our council provides us with three garbage collection bins to reduce the amount of waste going into landfill. Once a week the general waste is collected (red lid), and on alternate weeks they collect recycling material (yellow lid) and garden waste and lawn mower cuttings (green lid).

This system works very well and recycling rates are very high.

I also do my own composting which further reduces landfill.
 
Wow Josiah, that's great of you to make the drive to recycle.

My apartment complex has recycling bins. Emptied 2-3 times a week. Not sure. I have relatively a small amount of garbage and don't use garbage bags. I use empty bags food comes in. Even toilet paper plastic. I do live in California.
 

Josiah09 said:
I know some of you may live in recycling friendly places and some of you may not. Where I live in small town southern Ohio there is very little consciousness of the recycling ethic. There use to be some recycling dumpsters at one end of the Walmart parking lot. The company responsible for emptying the dumpsters was very lax and most of the time the dumpsters were overflowing, People started leaving stuff everywhere and eventually Walmart arranged to have the operation ended. I still recycle but it involves driving into the outskirts of Cincinnati. It's a sad commentary about the absence of a sense of civic responsibility.
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We live way out in the boondocks, but there are a surprising number of recycling facilities fairly close by. There is a junk yard/metal recycling facility about 8 miles away, and they take everything from tin cans to bulk metal. We rinse the cans, and I crush them, and when we pass the place every couple of weeks, I drop off the metal. Then, there are some bins for glass, plastic, and paper/magazine/newspaper waste in a town we pass through on our way to the city to visit the kids and casinos about once a month, so I drop off the stuff there. We have an animal shelter up in town with a thrift shop, so if there is anything usable to get rid of...clothes, etc., we take it to them. I've tossed a couple of TV's and computers, etc., over the years, but I wait until we go to Jefferson City, for a doctor appt., and drop them off at an electronics recycling center up there.

We aren't hampered by any zoning rules, so I built a burn pit behind the house, and about once a week, I burn up the household garbage...usually about two 13 gal. sacks. Any food scraps we may have goes into a compost pile I keep at the back edge of the yard, and it eventually becomes fertilizer for the garden or dead spots in the grass.

We have a weekly trash service that comes through the area every Thursday, and I think they charge $15 a month for pickup....but in the 12.5 years we've been here, I haven't found any need to use them.
 
Our council provides each residence with a paper & cardboard bin. Sheltered housing units get bins for everything. I recycle all paper and cardboard, and there are a couple of places I drive right past that has bins for bottles, cans and plastic. So I drop those off there. In town there is a big recycle yard for electronics and every other type of junk.

My husband burns leaves and garden rubbish.
 
I live in a mid-sized city that has weekly garbage and recycling pick-ups. The recycling is free (you get one container, I believe it's a 35-gallon one), but the household garbage costs you about $1.50/bag (you are responsible for buying the bags).

The recycling picks up bottles, cans, paper, glass, cardboard and plastic, and yard waste in season. It's nice to walk down the street on pick-up day and see how much stuff is NOT being thrown into landfill - plus, I get to see how many beers and bottles of wine my neighbors drank the previous week. ;)
 
We have four bins, plastics and metal, paper, food and biological and other. They don' pick up glass from individual homes, but there are recycling points on virtually every street.

Locally we are now recycling more that 70%, one of the highesr rates in the UK.

Of course, over here the European Union taxes every tonne of landfill, and that tax is passed on to us, so there's a good incentive!
 
I'm try to be good when it comes to recycling. We have bins for normal garbage, cardboard and other recyclable paper and commingles. We get fined if we put anything other than commingles in the bin marked for commingles and the cardboard and paper bins.
 
We recycle glass, tin, paper and cardboard, garden waste, and food waste from the kerbside.
also textiles....forgot!
nearby I have a large recycling stir for electrical items and things too large for the bin...like bits of tree, duvets etc.
our supermarkets recycle batteries and printer cartridges.
i have very little non-recycleable waste....
 
We have a recycle center in town. There is no recycling pick up, you have to bring it yourself. They take glass, plastic, cans, paper, and cardboard. I separate it and drop it off whenever I go to town.

I make compost with yard waste and burn limbs and brush.


Anything else ( which isn't much ) I take to the landfill a couple of times per year.
 
There's not really a recycling option around here. Our garbage pickup doesn't sort out recyclable materials-everything goes into the same garbage can. We do compost quite a bit, but beyond that what doesn't get thrown out gets burned.

Chemicals, used vehicle fluids, etc. get taken to a transfer station a couple times each year.
 
Waste Management supplies us with two large bins, on wheels, one for garbage, and one for all recyclables. They pick up both on Tuesday mornings as well as green waste. The trucks had automatic arms that grab bins and empty them. Untouched by human hands.
 
Pappy said:
Waste Management supplies us with two large bins, on wheels, one for garbage, and one for all recyclables. They pick up both on Tuesday mornings as well as green waste. The trucks had automatic arms that grab bins and empty them. Untouched by human hands.
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2 trucks or do they all in both??
 
When we had our house south of Denver, CO, we had a big plastic trash can for regular trash and one for recycling that was picked up weekly. We would crush soda cans, put in large trash bags and take to a recycling plant down the street from where I worked.

Here, at the apartment we're in now, no recycling containers or pickup at all. We do keep and use all of our plastic Wal Mart and grocery store bags and use them. Don't drink soda anymore, so don't worry about that.
 
I was amazed when I visited my sister in Maine. They are so cautious about recycling! Instead of paper towels, people use and wash out rags. Never paper napkins either. They sort out and recycle everything possible.
Where I live, the city provides recycle bins and they are emptied twice a month. I do like to recycle because it's free and easy.
In the rural areas, it actually costs extra money for recycle pick up. Not sure I'd pay.
 
SifuPhil said:
I live in a mid-sized city that has weekly garbage and recycling pick-ups. The recycling is free (you get one container, I believe it's a 35-gallon one), but the household garbage costs you about $1.50/bag (you are responsible for buying the bags).

Nothing is "Free" Someone pays for it.

Gene
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About 9 or 10 years ago our area was given the big plastic bins with handles for our rubbish, and later a blue one for recycle. They stopped allowing bin bags as workers got injured by grabbing bags that had something sharp in them. We were told when we got these new bins that the handles should be facing out to the street to make them easier and faster to grab by the bin men/women.
 
We still use bags....for everything.
black ones for general rubbish; clear for recycling, and bio-degrade able for food.
they supply plastic bins for food waste, so they don't smell and get attacked by cats or foxes!
 
Nova Scotia is pretty focused on recycling. Paper separate, packaging including cans and bottles separate and I compost all the food scraps.

Yesterday I watched David Suzuki and his daughter (on The Nature Of Things) go on a tour of Denmark, Germany and Spain to see how they handle things like recycling and transportation and I was enthralled. We all need to be copying the things I saw on that show! They even showed a company that makes a beautiful office chair that is 97% recyclable.

And I watched a show once called Trashopolis and found out that Berlin has NO garbage dumps! None. Everything is sorted and recycled and the garbage collection service is actually fuelled by using methane created by the garbage! It's fabulous. And the Reichstag (which I think is their Parliament building) is heated with vegetable oil! How cool is that?

I love the whole concept of recycling and living green.
 
I have to recycle and have some bins collected
evey Wednesday, though not always the same
ones:-
One week, Plastic, Glass and Metal, plus food
waste for compsting, the food is every week.
The next week, Paper and general waste and
food. Textiles are also collected but I don't know
which week as I have never put any out.
Garden waste every two weeks from spring till
the autumn, (Fall).

Mike.
 

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