Purple bag scheme (Recycling)

Our local council here in north west Cumbria has started a "Purple Bag Scheme", as it suggests its a purple bin bag for the following: "Glass bottles and Jars, metal cans and plastic bottles only" <-- Quote from the side of the bag !!

This is a huge step forward and for me (an avid recycler) its fantastic !

In a week I've already filled one bag (bag is one and half times the size of a normal binbag) and the two weekly collection will see them pick up two of 'em. Thats the equivalent of three binbags a fortnight less going to landfill from one household, or 78 a year.

Do any of you have similar schemes where you live?

Steve...

 

We have a blue box scheme for cans, glass, plastic and paper. This is collected once a fortnight. The wheelie bin collection has dropped to once a fortnight too but I find that I don't even fill it now with the amount of stuff that goes into the recycling boxes.
Our council has just opened a new recycling centre which is brilliant - we can take anything there - batteries, flourescent tubes, rubble. My clutter is diminishing :thumb:

 

Here in Wychavon we have Purple bags for paper,White for plastics & cans, Black box for bottles/glass and just introduced at a cost of £35 a year,Green bins for garden waste......I recycle everything I possibly can but I keep my garden waste for my own compost and mulch.:thumb:

 

We have a black box here for glass and paper a brown box for food waste and you can put cardboard out to but not in a bag so it blows allover the place :rolleyes: thats all picked up weekly we have to take plastic to the tip or theres a thing at the local shops
we also have a garden waste bin but you have to buy it fot 25 quid then pay 35 a year for them to empty it or they allso sell you baga for a quid a go you can use :rolleyes:

 

we have 3 orange boxes for various paper/tins/glass weekly collection
then we have a plastic bag which takes plastic bottles without their lids only with a fortnightly collection
wheelie bin is also every two weeks as well as green bags for garden waste

The daft thing is they dont take any other kinds of plastic except bottles and not their lids!
But i suppose its better than nothing!
We are not however impressed with our wheelie bin only being collected once a fortnight now as we have to keep it in garage and with the summer heat it stinks the whole garage and hallway out... yuk yuk yuk!

 

can you beleve they charge a quid for that bag :confused:

 

We have one week which is green...green wheelie bin for garden waste, cardboard and paper and green box for glass. the next week is black, normal waste in the black wheelie bin and black box for tins and plastic bottles.

The thing is I like recycling and rarly fill the black bin:D but we too can only put plastic bottles in the box for plastic. I looked at the council website and it says that because not all plastics are recyclable they have decided to simplify it and only allow bottles. this makes me mad, we are not daft and many plastic things these days have a recycle mark on them but we can't put them in because they are not shaped like a bottle! I understand that some people get confused (my mum would) if they could reword it to say "only recyclable plastic, if you are unsure only put in bottles" it would help save a lot of rubbish. It's not like we'd dare put in anything not recyclable as we would just get a little 'note' in the box telling us off!:rolleyes:

 

Our council does a very good job, IMHO. We even have little pink plastic bags that we can put batteries in, and there is a little pink hook on the side of our Blue recycle bin for them. How cute is that?! We have Brown bins for garden waste (I live out in the country) and I just can't imagine why anyone would have one, rather than using a compost heap, but all the houses seem to put one out - even the ones with really nice gardens! Hmmm ... off to look into what compost they are making, and whether its cheap-as-chips ...

 

our council collect tins, glass and papers, but not plastic. It seems a shame as there is so much plastic waste these days. I take all my carrier bags back to Tesco to recycling bin. I keep meaning to use my bags for life but I keep forgetting to put them back in the car.:rolleyes: 02

 

Scandalous high price but I guess the idea is to deter their use, I only get rid of weeds and one of those bags per year would suffice for me, but in the past I have seen neighbours filling their bins with soil, so striking a balance or a happy medium is probably a hard thing to do for the councills.

Steve...

 

The main problem i have with the fact its a quid is that it goes in to the lorry that they collect the other garden waste and food waste in therefore it is recycled

am i the only one here who has to pay to get rid of garden waste ?

 

I am also an avid recycler - but even more so, a reducer. More than recycling, I think it is vital that we REDUCE the amount of waste (recyclable or not) that we buy in the first place!

Take the plastic bottle: buy one once then refill it over and over instead of going to buy another. Buying the largest quantity of something may help reduce packaging. Some companies are catching on eg. making fabric conditioner concentrated so it doesn't take so much plastic for the bottle, and more can fit in the lorry. An even better solution; don't buy fabric conditioner - it's not necessary!

Do we really NEED to buy overly packaged things, when we can buy eg. fresh produce off the shelf that's not pre-packed (and doesn't need to go into the little clear bags they offer).

LUSH cosmetics have fabulous ethics when it comes to packaging/recycling/reducing etc. They make eg. solid shampoo bars which need no packaging atall.

A couple of quotes from them:
We are not ashamed to under package
By producing unpackaged products we minimise landfill waste.

In Dumfries, we have our black wheelie bins, and a blue box for paper. That's it!!! There are bottle collection points, and supermarket bag recycling, the local waste management sites do have separate containers for plastic bottles, batteries and cardboard but that's about it. Very poor.

We have a new 'eco-deco' site, where all the household waste is processed into 'fuel pellets', which are at the moment going into some concrete mix on a large scale down south (Yorkshire way) - not the most environmentally friendly solution me thinks! However, car-boot sales are going great locally, an the charity shops don't seem to be it too badly.

My mum bought me a string bag recently - it's THEE best carrier I've used in ages! :D

 

We have a great rubbish collection here.

We have 3 wheelie bins:

green for garden waste collected fortnightly from may to november (I think)
blue for recycling - paper, card (also taken in the green bin), glass, cans and certain plastics collected fortnightly
Black for all the other rubbish which is collected weekly

We're really good at recycling in my house and we swapped our blue bin for a bigger one and have a small black bin

 

Saw the most gorgeous purple wheelie bins in Liverpool a couple of years ago - though don't know what waste they were for - I loved them!:thumb: