Campaign for Real Recycling

[mirrorshard]

Via vashti, the Campaign for Real Recycling.

Summary: indiscriminate piles of Stuff in the recycling box is bad, though not as bad as not recycling at all. Some councils sort at the point of collection (Waltham Forest does, it seems) and that not only substantially reduces the energy load needed to recycle the material, but makes useful recycling possible in the first place for some of it.

For instance, if glass is crushed (as usually happens with mixed recycling streams) then it can only be used for road aggregate rather than being reformed into bottles, packing material, or all the other useful stuff we get.

So if your local council don't separate their streams - or don't recycle at all - the single most useful thing you can do is take your glass down to the bottle bank and put it in the right holes yourself.

Though I do also have to put in a good word for throwing glass bottles into the sea. There isn't nearly enough seaglass around these days.

Comments

[owlfish]

The local bottle recycling container is tall and deep and most of the bottles smash on its floor when dropped in. The design of our local container is rather working against this idea.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Smashing is actually OK - they can melt and reform broken glass quite happily, but indiscriminately powdered glass-and-other-stuff they can't.

[keira-online.livejournal.com]

We have two reclying colllections....glass, plastic and cardboard in one box, newspaper and tins in the other. The vans that come round are divided up, so that they can sort at the point of collection.