Bokashi

Quite agree with you both. Saying it would save money on bin liners was a spur of the moment thing. I reuse carrier bags but not for every bit of rubbish. It is just a gloried darlek with a wire cage at the bottom and isn't worth £70+.

BUT think about the bigger picture here. If every single household had one of these in there garden there wouldn't have to be as regular bin collections, councils paying fines for the amount of rubbish we send to landfill etc. Council tax may go down, (highly unlikely I know) but if the council supplied them for a quarter of the price I would buy one.

 

I got my two Daleks from my council (i.e. price subsidised) a few years ago. I have forgotten the price, but they were cheaper than me finding the time to strap some pallets together!

I don't think the subsidised deals from councils exist any more, but I just looked at the website and Daleks are only £16 in my area, which seems like a very good deal. Waterbutts and other things too - no Green Cones in my area though.

Might be worth folk putting your postcode in and seeing if there are any good deals in your area (England, separate sites for Scotland / Wales apparently):
http://www.getcomposting.com/

Main recycle site:
http://www.recyclenow.com/home_composting/index.html
found that I have a bottle recycle site closer than the one I've been using for years !!

 

We have a single recycle bin system, so no sorting required, but it doesn't include glass (basically anything "dry" or "washed" - in terms of plastic; a few things are prohibited, like polystyrene food trays [dunno why, and I'm sure some households put them in accidentally]). I think its a good system as required minimal effort to get all households to recycle.

We have a separate "hook" on the outside of the recycle wheelie-bin that we can hang a bag of used-batteries on.

I don't have a problem with recycling glass "ourselves". All the schools / supermarkets / village halls in the area have bottle-banks, so its just a question of taking them with you when you go out (if you managed to get them home then you can take them back I reckon )

 

Me too, seems like a huge amount of manual effort to separate, and wages are expensive in UK.

Originally we just had orange bags, and you put these in the normal wheelie bin and they went into the crusher vehicle with all the other rubbish bags. No idea how (or if!!) they separated them out (the word was that they went to 3rd world for separating - not very green on trans-continental-shipping!), but I wasn't concerned because Step One is to get people to separate recycleable materials from waste - whilst the council is tooling up building the infrastructure and plant to actually be able to recycle the stuff

We aren't allow to "bag" anything in the recycle bin, so I presume it is tipped out onto a conveyor belt for separation. Metals etc. can be handled by magnet / magnetic flux, and light materials by an up-draught ... but I have no idea how they separate Type-1 plastic bottles from Type-2. I have heard that in some areas folk have to look at the little triangles on the plastic packaging and then separate out into types ... can't see 100% of folk doing that (and what about tourist visitors and even guests staying for the weekend?)

But I've also seen recycling companies saying they have to "landfill" whole bales of "supposedly sorted waste" that they receive because the junk-content is too high. I think the person interviewed on the documentary said something like "We buy all our recycle bales from Germany because they sort them better than the UK providers" ...

But that was a year or two back, and TBH I don't care if it actually goes into landfill for N-years - so long as technology and plant is being readied for a slick solution that end-users will be easily able to put their recyclables into. Our council has won national awards for recycling, so hopefully they have best-foot-forward at least!

 

A lot of our recycling I read goes off to India to be sorted and usually the bits they don't want end up in a land fill.

To me it seems rather ignorant that we simply bury our rubbish and just forget about it or let it be someone else's problem. I do voluntary work for a new nature park opening in Essex which has been built on a landfill and the amount of things that can't be done or built because its all sitting on a big pile of rubbish is a real headache. Methane gas leaks quite regularly which is dangerous, no fires or smoking is allowed on the park. Although on the other side of the coin I have been told that the company who were doing the dumping are now harvesting the methane gas to power a small power station and then selling it back to the national grid. They are the first to do it in this country I believe.

I can remember a decade or more back when darleks were introduced. They too had a much larger price tag to them, than they do now. Once Green Cones become more widely available / known costs will go down. It happens with everything, but at what rate it will go down is anyones guess.

 

We have 8 'daleks', 3 pallet sized compost bays, about 10 m3 of corrugated iron sheet sided compost bays, several vast tubs for making liquid feed, hens, a greedy dog, don't eat meat (except fish), freeze fish heads for fishing/prawn bait, and even collect/get donated garden waste from neighbours, so don't have even the slightest need for one of these.

 

Yes, and parts of Africa too. Our eco friendly councils package up all our carefully sorted rubbish and send it half way round the world on large container ships, just to be dumped somewhere else.

When I was a kid and we kept horses, for a while they lived on a farm that had once been a landfill site. This is a long time ago, so maybe regulations have changed, but the horses grazed on the former landfill. We used to see the farmer quite often walking all around the field with a massive pole. He'd shove it into the ground then light the top. Sometimes nothing happened, but sometimes there'd be a sizeable flame for a few seconds. We thought it was some strange country practice so one day my dad plucked up the courage to ask him about it. The farmer explained he walked around, and where the ground felt spongy underfoot it was usually because there was a gas pocket there, and rather than waiting for someone to get hurt, he'd rather pop it himself.

 

The Shineyland Will O the Wisp.

 

Oh! I thought it was probably an old flame