Packaging could do with some standardised labels. I should be able to take some packaging look for a standard symbol and find the same symbol on one of my bins.
This feels like the easiest thing to do: mandate at a national (or even international) level a standard set of symbols for packaging at least, and get councils to give everyone a simple guide as to what symbols can go into each bin.
Our lives are busy enough without needing to learn the difference between different kinds of packaging. Isn't all this rinsing and sorting of our waste basically free labour for the waste industry?
Whenever I wash out yet another yoghurt pot I think about the tonnes of waste and pollution produced by the fashion and aviation industries and wonder if I’m just a mug.
This seems like the right take to me - it doesn't seem very plausible that the socially optimum way to do this is for waste sorting to be done by unskilled voluntary labour. Also a bit uncheems to think it can't be mechanised or automated.
Growing number of incinerators; a feature not a bug. All that methane from landfill avoided
And of course if you really want to reduce the use on incinerators then the best and easiest way is to recycle more - or make different purchasing choices
Any thoughts on the lack of recycling facilities for CDs and DVDs? At our local recycling centre our CDs and DVDs all ended up in the general waste bin...none of our charity shops wanted them either.
When I worked in Stockholm there were communal recycling containers (too big to be called bins) on pretty much every street corner in residential areas, which explained to me how they have much higher recycling rates in Sweden.
It’s one of those difficult recycling types, so unless there’s a special facility in your area, it’ll be difficult. Might be some online / specialty ones that aren’t council run but it kind of leaves it to you to figure it out, which is the problem with all these niche recycling types!
I get unreasonably narked seeing people put non-recyclable stuff into their recycling bins. Easy enough to do though - plastic bags are plastic, we're told to recycle plastic so in it goes. Should there be a message that if you're not sure, put it in the non-recyclable? Is that sort of contamination a major issue with modern recycling?
I think the problem is that it’s just an unpopular message to deliver. It’s the same with vapes, people in councils don’t want to advertise recycling vapes because they don’t want to be seen as promoting vaping. So while it is probably better to be clear about tossing some plastics, the political trade offs are probably unpalatable. Or perhaps there’s been user research that its too confusing for people. It’s surprisingly complicated and without something like the German culture of recycling, it’s always going to be some confusion as it relies on people being aware of industrial categories of plastics.
Oh good, someone who knows about this industry! So, perhaps you know: why is weekly food waste recycling important enough to merit £295m of funding (from your link in #1)? How does it benefit the people paying for it? (In short, I'm trying to get at the root of the question you ask in the title: why?)
In short - all recycling is a policy decision, so that’s where it comes from. And all the policy trade offs that entails. The £295m is the implementation for the new mandatory food collection service (so all the boroughs will need to arrange new contracts, collections, vehicles, etc.) Theoretically this will be a net gain over time as food waste / compost is more valuable a commodity and in the long run should reduce the residual waste.
Thanks, that makes your framework clear - you're saying 'given that it has been decided this is a priority and given the particular constraints, the system has to work in this particular way'. That's helpful.
But I suspect that most people, when they suddenly have to handle 7 bins or whatever, will be asking 'why' in a broader sense that includes 'why was this policy decided to begin with', and will find an implementation-focused answer such as yours unsatisfying. But you've made it clear that the larger question is out of scope, so I shan't ask further! Thanks again.
I'm wondering why there isn't an app that lets you scan the barcode on a package and see which bin to put it in. Or at least (for plastics, say), whether it's recyclable or not.
My biggest beef is why oh why do practically all plastics display their P number which indicates their recyling category but local authorities ignore this in their guidance- which is why there is such confusion around this area.
At the risk of sounding like Tim Leunig in a particularly controversial mood, I do wonder whether "Steptoe and Son" has some relevance. It does seem quite backward that Councils are seeking to use charges to drive commercial waste middlemen out of business, leading to flytipping all over, while paying them to do the waste separation and cleaning might have benefits. If households provided the waste in cleaned and separated bins, they could get a rebate.
Our collections are the opposite to yours: recycling & food waste are weekly, general non-rcycleable & garden waste fortnightly. Recycling goes in bags supplied by the council, food waste in a small blue bin and garden waste in a brown bin. We were recently supplied with extra large black bins for general waste. Our council (Hackney) recycles all stiff plastics (bottles, food packaging trays &c) and the local Sainsbury's has a collection point plastic bags which was recently extended to other soft plastics like biscuit wrappers and polythene and Lidl has one for batteries. The biggest problem, as far as I'm aware, are composite materials like the plastic & paper cups, jam jar lids (because of the rubber seals, but I've never been entirely certain as I imagine the metal is valuable enough to warrant the effort of removing the non-metallic components) or the foil & plastic seals you find on certain plastic pots (which I find particularly annoying because they're unnecessarily wasteful, but more and more they're being replaced with plastic only). Like you, our recycling is at least twice the volume of our general waste, but I may be more conscientious about recycling than some – certainly my son and his friends, which surprises me as I was under the impression that environmental concerns are greater among the young, at least broadly speaking?
The problem with separating more recycling, isn't just the space the bins take up but the number of separate receptacles you'd need indoors. The small, medium and large outside bins aren't really a problem, as we live in a terraced house with a small front garden, but accommodating more than one extra medium bin would be.
My parents have a house in the South of France and in their village all recycling goes in a single yellow bin, with the exception of glass, which goes in a bottle bank with separate compartments for green, brown and clear glass (I've no idea what you're supposed to do with blue glass? My guess is to put it with the green? I don't suppose there's enough of it to warrant another compartment, although I believe it's more expensive than the other three, so presumably more valuable?).
Anyway, thank you for your thought-provoking piece. I have subscribed to your SubStack since James recommended you.
Packaging could do with some standardised labels. I should be able to take some packaging look for a standard symbol and find the same symbol on one of my bins.
This feels like the easiest thing to do: mandate at a national (or even international) level a standard set of symbols for packaging at least, and get councils to give everyone a simple guide as to what symbols can go into each bin.
Our lives are busy enough without needing to learn the difference between different kinds of packaging. Isn't all this rinsing and sorting of our waste basically free labour for the waste industry?
Whenever I wash out yet another yoghurt pot I think about the tonnes of waste and pollution produced by the fashion and aviation industries and wonder if I’m just a mug.
This seems like the right take to me - it doesn't seem very plausible that the socially optimum way to do this is for waste sorting to be done by unskilled voluntary labour. Also a bit uncheems to think it can't be mechanised or automated.
Growing number of incinerators; a feature not a bug. All that methane from landfill avoided
And of course if you really want to reduce the use on incinerators then the best and easiest way is to recycle more - or make different purchasing choices
Any thoughts on the lack of recycling facilities for CDs and DVDs? At our local recycling centre our CDs and DVDs all ended up in the general waste bin...none of our charity shops wanted them either.
When I worked in Stockholm there were communal recycling containers (too big to be called bins) on pretty much every street corner in residential areas, which explained to me how they have much higher recycling rates in Sweden.
It’s one of those difficult recycling types, so unless there’s a special facility in your area, it’ll be difficult. Might be some online / specialty ones that aren’t council run but it kind of leaves it to you to figure it out, which is the problem with all these niche recycling types!
I get unreasonably narked seeing people put non-recyclable stuff into their recycling bins. Easy enough to do though - plastic bags are plastic, we're told to recycle plastic so in it goes. Should there be a message that if you're not sure, put it in the non-recyclable? Is that sort of contamination a major issue with modern recycling?
I think the problem is that it’s just an unpopular message to deliver. It’s the same with vapes, people in councils don’t want to advertise recycling vapes because they don’t want to be seen as promoting vaping. So while it is probably better to be clear about tossing some plastics, the political trade offs are probably unpalatable. Or perhaps there’s been user research that its too confusing for people. It’s surprisingly complicated and without something like the German culture of recycling, it’s always going to be some confusion as it relies on people being aware of industrial categories of plastics.
Oh good, someone who knows about this industry! So, perhaps you know: why is weekly food waste recycling important enough to merit £295m of funding (from your link in #1)? How does it benefit the people paying for it? (In short, I'm trying to get at the root of the question you ask in the title: why?)
In short - all recycling is a policy decision, so that’s where it comes from. And all the policy trade offs that entails. The £295m is the implementation for the new mandatory food collection service (so all the boroughs will need to arrange new contracts, collections, vehicles, etc.) Theoretically this will be a net gain over time as food waste / compost is more valuable a commodity and in the long run should reduce the residual waste.
Thanks, that makes your framework clear - you're saying 'given that it has been decided this is a priority and given the particular constraints, the system has to work in this particular way'. That's helpful.
But I suspect that most people, when they suddenly have to handle 7 bins or whatever, will be asking 'why' in a broader sense that includes 'why was this policy decided to begin with', and will find an implementation-focused answer such as yours unsatisfying. But you've made it clear that the larger question is out of scope, so I shan't ask further! Thanks again.
I'm wondering why there isn't an app that lets you scan the barcode on a package and see which bin to put it in. Or at least (for plastics, say), whether it's recyclable or not.
My biggest beef is why oh why do practically all plastics display their P number which indicates their recyling category but local authorities ignore this in their guidance- which is why there is such confusion around this area.
At the risk of sounding like Tim Leunig in a particularly controversial mood, I do wonder whether "Steptoe and Son" has some relevance. It does seem quite backward that Councils are seeking to use charges to drive commercial waste middlemen out of business, leading to flytipping all over, while paying them to do the waste separation and cleaning might have benefits. If households provided the waste in cleaned and separated bins, they could get a rebate.
Our collections are the opposite to yours: recycling & food waste are weekly, general non-rcycleable & garden waste fortnightly. Recycling goes in bags supplied by the council, food waste in a small blue bin and garden waste in a brown bin. We were recently supplied with extra large black bins for general waste. Our council (Hackney) recycles all stiff plastics (bottles, food packaging trays &c) and the local Sainsbury's has a collection point plastic bags which was recently extended to other soft plastics like biscuit wrappers and polythene and Lidl has one for batteries. The biggest problem, as far as I'm aware, are composite materials like the plastic & paper cups, jam jar lids (because of the rubber seals, but I've never been entirely certain as I imagine the metal is valuable enough to warrant the effort of removing the non-metallic components) or the foil & plastic seals you find on certain plastic pots (which I find particularly annoying because they're unnecessarily wasteful, but more and more they're being replaced with plastic only). Like you, our recycling is at least twice the volume of our general waste, but I may be more conscientious about recycling than some – certainly my son and his friends, which surprises me as I was under the impression that environmental concerns are greater among the young, at least broadly speaking?
The problem with separating more recycling, isn't just the space the bins take up but the number of separate receptacles you'd need indoors. The small, medium and large outside bins aren't really a problem, as we live in a terraced house with a small front garden, but accommodating more than one extra medium bin would be.
My parents have a house in the South of France and in their village all recycling goes in a single yellow bin, with the exception of glass, which goes in a bottle bank with separate compartments for green, brown and clear glass (I've no idea what you're supposed to do with blue glass? My guess is to put it with the green? I don't suppose there's enough of it to warrant another compartment, although I believe it's more expensive than the other three, so presumably more valuable?).
Anyway, thank you for your thought-provoking piece. I have subscribed to your SubStack since James recommended you.