Cardboard Recycling made me think

I'm just glad to see recyclable things recycled according to local authority guidelines. If those guidelines don't specify that cardboard should be folded down or otherwise presented in a specific way, I am not going to judge a householder for failing to go beyond what was asked of them. Well, within reason, obviously!

Calendargirl

I can’t understand people who have bins overflowing, but you can see it has never occurred to them to flatten boxes.

Our bin men are only supposed to take what’s in the bin, but often see stuff piled up next to it. Not sure if it gets taken.

I was once startled to find that a presumably highly intelligent temp co worker (Oxford classics student) thought the only way to flatten cardboard boxes for the recycling was to stamp on them.

I saw light dawn as I showed him how to take a sharp knife to the joins!

We are currently doing up a house and this does generate a lot of very large cardboard.

Today we unrolled some vinyl flooring. In the centre is a 6ft roll of cardboard, the card is nearly a centimetre thick and neither DH or I could even begin to fold this down, it would need a saw to cut it into pieces. Not a problem for us, we have an estate car and it will go in and we will take it to the tip. But not everyone has a car big enough, or any car at all

Where we used to live large cardboard boxes, flattened, could be left beside the bin.

While these huge criminally organised dumping is outside the domestic sphere. The area we moved from six months ago one hand was complaining about increased flytipping, small quantities left by the road size, while at the same time making using the tip both difficult and expensive.

Until COVID, you just drove to the tip and put any waste in the relevant recepticle, but then they started charging for some materials and banning others. Any thing defined as 'rubble' was charged at £1.50 a bag, so when i dug up some broken bricks and big stones in the garden, I was charged for disposing of them. Then they made anything they defined as DIY waste as chargeable. We took an old kitchen cabinet that had been used in our garage for storage to the tip and were told it was DIY waste and had to be paid for.

Now we have heard that all visits have to be booked. Understandable possibly at busy times, but during the week, there was rarely a queue, and never more than a few cars.

We had a garden containing trees and surrounded by trees, in the Autumn, I would sometimes do three trips to the tip in an afternoon with two big builders sacks of leaves. All very last minute depending on whether it was windy or not, whether the leaves were wet and how much energy I had.

Then they complain about flytipping.

6ft roll of cardboard, the card is nearly a centimetre thick

Our local community hub would love this for their craft classes

I am sure there are lots of uses for a lot of what we are currently recycling, but there is a limit tonhow much time one has to sepend looking for suitable places to reus e goods rather than recycle them.

Fortunately most waste is burned in incinerators and used to generate electricity with the limited solid waste at the end of the process used to make building productss like breeze blocks and insulating materials.

I wnet round one of these waste plants a year or two back and was absolutely amazed at how well they worked. Their emissions are closely monitored by the Environment Agency and they are always well within limits.

There used to be a "Bits and bobs" initiative in my town, and I think in other places as well. They would collect manufacturing waste from workshops and factories, and make it available to people running nurseries, playgroups, craft groups, drama classes and so on. You could join (free, I think) and buy a supermarket trolley full amount for a very nominial cost, just enough to keep them funded. They also welcomed donations from individual people of fabrics, wool, paint, cardboard tubes - all the things that someone else could use. I have accompanied someone round their store-room,storage building. It was a crafter's dream! Bins held part rolls of shiny coloured plastic, round punched-out pieces of metal about a quarter-inch across in mixed colours, perfume-sized bottles (empty), offcuts of wood, polystyrene, fabric of all kinds, flattened cardboard boxes in all sizes, tins of house paint, boxes of pencils, rolls of wallpaper. They also held crafting sessions for children and adults, using the donated materials, and would visit and give talks on recycling to anyone who would listen.

I haven't heard anything about them for a long while. The big problems with doing anything like this are premises, volunteers and funding. Volunteers do marvels for nothing, but premises cost money, and funding is hard to get and can take up more volunteer time.