The company said food packaging should always be rinsed,
In the calculations of the resource savings from recycling that rinsing water is included, right? And the time?
suggested households only recycle the tops of pizza boxes to avoid grease contamination.
And the time taken to tear up pizza boxes?
Can’t help but think that large automated factories will use less resources to do all of this than 29 million pieces of home work.
I naturally think that the good old burn, bash and bury policy of my childhood is the correct one.
Says I as I admire my white, white hair in the mirror.
But it isn’t about saving the planet.
It’s about making the good little drones do as they’re told.
Around 1 BC (Before Covid) I was at a party chatting to a guy who designs paper and card recycling machines. He reckoned much of what you’re supposed to do for recycling paper is nonsense. His machines will happily remove packing tape, mailer labels, staples, letter windows and the like. What they can’t handle is grease, which makes the output useless in large quantities, and colouring from food or otherwise, which won’t stop the recycling but will reduce the value of the final product.
What Chernyy said.
OTOH I have no problem doing an 8 mile bike ride to put one “recycle at supermarkets” plastic bag into the appropriate bin — but that’s only because it gives me an excuse to get some exercise, and saves having to decide where to go while doing so.
While virgin forest is being cut down to burn in Drax power station, we are fussing over recycling pizza boxes. Just burn them as well FFS.
“And the time?”
You give up 50% of your work time for The Good Thing. Thus it stands to reason you should also give up 50% of your free time for The Good Thing.
I heard some bloke from a recycling company on the radio saying how we should rinse everything and not squash plastic bottles down and a few other things.
I thought FFS, do you want us to do the recycling for you and just hand you the money?
They’ve started doorstep recycling collections here every Tuesday…
We can put out two bags, PMD and cardboard… All the useful stuff that I’d like them to cart away (mainly empty wine bottles) they obviously have no interest in as they have no value…
I wonder what they do at the sorting centre with my old toilet seat, half-full paint tub and all the other ‘unusual’ stuff you can squeeze into a PMD bag…
My council brags that all rubbish is sorted and nothing goes to landfill, so I ensure that all my “recycling” goes into the black bin with everything else. To be fair, it would all go in there anyway, but it’s nice to know they’re feeling warm about themselves carefully sorting my unrinsed, crushed plastic milk bottles out from the neighbours’ shitty disposable nappies.
Wash recycling? Not bloody likely. I don’t even bother to take out the mouldy steak and kidney pie from its cardboard wrapper before I chuck it all in the paper recycling.
I’ve tried washing pizza boxes – they go all gooey and clog up the sink. Tried washing a foam pillow in an old Hoovermatic Twin Tub many, many moons ago. Devils own job getting all the bits out when it split open I can tell you. (You can’t wash cat litter either…..).
Chernyy Drakon: I used to be sceptical of that idea (although not unsympathetic). But the various Events of the last couple of years have… let’s say, “done little to persuade me otherwise”.
The only things I wash before putting in the bin (yeah, the bin) are milk cartons, because they’re apt to pong a bit if I don’t take it out for a day or two. Otherwise… what are the Cleansing Department for, exactly?
Another reason to tear pizza boxes and large packaging is that it otherwise takes up a vast amount of space in communal recycling bins. This is antisocial. Other residents can’t get their recycling in. My bins have got to the point where I go and cut up some packaging in them or have to bag up smaller items (plastic pots, bottles, cans etc.) and distribute them around the public recycling bins in town, which are emptied almost daily.
All morality is about making the good little drones sacrifice for a cause.