Green backlash?

[SlugLobber]

She has 5 young children so you would think she would want to save the planet.

It's probably more that she doesn't have time to recycle. Sounds like she's busy doing 'other things', lol! Can't reach the recycling bin from the bed, can you?!?

On the plus side, Tesco have now started leaving cardboard trays near the checkout. So much easier packing in those than using bags!!!

[Dipzy]

I have to admit I feel very guilty when I go shopping and have to ask for a bag because I forgot my recycle bags or didn't bring enough. The kids really take the recycling on board if you explain it to them, recycling just becomes habit now I think.

We have a large wheelie bin in the front of our house, which we now no longer use for rubbish as we recylce so much and only put out and small about of rubbish each week. On the other hand we completely fill it up with plastics every week. Sadly our bin men come and empty it not realising it is full of plastics.

I don't know what suprises me most 1) the fact that our recycle men are happy to leave our cardboard, foil and paper if it isn't in the right bag or bin or 2) that our bin men pick up our rubbish bag at the top of the driveway and then walk to our wheelie bin at the front door and empty it, never used to do this when they were paid to do it so why are they starting now.

What ever you do you can't win. This week I put all the plastics in the back of my car the night before to make sure they didn't take it away, then recycled it on my next trip to Tesco in their recylce units.

[Kristen]

We put our shopping bags by the front door when we unload, so that they go into the car next time we go out. Thus we always have the bags in the car when the shopping urge (or more usually "dire need"!) strikes!

I have ticked the box on Tesco's home delivery for no bags

And given what I understand of other countries total bans (well, usually a tax which had the same effect) on plastic bags I can't understand why they are still available in the supermarkets here

[Two_Sheds]

I'm due a Tesco delivery (no bags) tonight... the mind boggles ... will the driver just tip everything loose onto the lawn?

We keep a couple of fold-flat boxes/crates in the boot for shopping. They fit nicely into a small trolley. Load with shopping, unload onto checkout, load shopping back into crate, take to car, unload at home, put empty crate back in car boot. Easy.

[HeyWayne]

We (LW) ticked "no bags" - but the shopping still arived clad in plastic. Dude had gone before we could unpack and give them back.

[Kristen]

"will the driver just tip everything loose onto the lawn?"

Our driver piles all the trays up on his sack-barrow and wheels it straight through the house into the kitchen and then helps us unload.

But I suppose he'd tip it all onto the lawn if I asked him nicely

[Comfreyfan]

What makes me really mad is individually shrink wrapped veg - like swede, for goodness sake they're dug out of the earth and dragged around in a trailer and then someone thinks it's a good idea to wrap them up! And just recently I've seen supermarket peppers individually wrapped - grrrr

[seasprout]

In our street we were all given square recycling boxes,

I actually had my recycling box stolen last Friday, i put it out for the binmen, and somebody stole it away after they had emptied it.

[seasprout]

I'm due a Tesco delivery (no bags) tonight... the mind boggles ... will the driver just tip everything loose onto the lawn?

.

I'm expecting a Tesco Delivery next Monday Evening.
But it is 2 case's of wine. The wine is in Glass bottles in cardboard boxes, both recyclable.....You see clever thinking.

Live off wine...save the Planet.

[janeyo]

I normally save up my plastic that I have been handed without asking for or because I haven't enough space left on the buggy and so have to ask for a bag somewhere, and then give it all the tesco delivery chap / chapess when tthey come. They take any bags you give them

janeyo

[Sunbeam]

We take our own bags to the supermarket when we go & refuse the placcy ones, but have found we have now have to buy bin bags, which I never did before ...obviously I started off buying the biodegradable ones - which ALWAYS split on the way to the big bin...but have switched to the nasty non-bio ones...

Does anyone have an alternative solution? (Other than bringing the wheelie-bin into the kitchen?!)

[jackie j]

We have the bags for life and reuse them when we go to the supermarket.
When I worked on the home delivery dept as a picker we had to keep things seperate so smelly stuff in a bag, fruit and veg in a bag, tins in a bag etc you get the picture, but some of the younger ones took this to mean one item one bag lots of complaints, now as some of you have said you can tick the no bag box. If they leave you with any bags keep them till next time and give them back or complain to the store.

[bluemoon]

I couldn't understand how anyone could refuse to re-cycle - and still can't, I'm the eco-fascist after all - but on Saturday I did suffer extreme frustration at our local dump-it site. They re-cycle everything possible, which is great, but we had agreed to take a car full of stuff there from my mum's church. Basically the church has regular fund raising events and Saturday was the annual 'Cream Tea'. Anyway many people seem to think that any church event equals jumble-sale and use it as an opportunity to dump their rubbish in the porch. So, with boxes full of grubby lamp-shades, chipped china and even a plastic microwave egg-poacher that hadn't been washed since last used, we headed off for the dump. - how people expect the church to sell this stuff is beyond me, but that's another rant - Once there we were forced to sort it all into various re-cycling skips. It took us well over an hour and a half. Had we been someone pushed for time, or the sort of people with less commitment to environmental issues, we may well have been tempted to drive away and fly-tip the lot. Sometimes the very people trying to do something positive are the ones who cause resentment and may force a backlash. After all, doing someone a favour cost us a precious Saturday afternoon.

[trebellangeminired]

We take our own bags to the supermarket when we go & refuse the placcy ones, but have found we have now have to buy bin bags, which I never did before ...obviously I started off buying the biodegradable ones - which ALWAYS split on the way to the big bin...but have switched to the nasty non-bio ones...

Does anyone have an alternative solution? (Other than bringing the wheelie-bin into the kitchen?!)

Hi Sunbeam,

We too use our own bags for shopping and at first we struggled with the whole bin liner thing but the combination of a change in our habits and facilities offered by our local council has meant that we have the opportunity of disposing of just about everything without bin liners. I hope this helps.

Veg waste goes to chooks or composter. We have a composting caddy in the kitchen and a bucket for chook food in the garage. Neither of them have liners but are rinsed out when emptied at least once a day. We try to use the water from the butts where possible. There's certainly no shortage of rainwater at the moment!

Meat waste including bones and sensitive documents (receipts, statements, etc.) goes in woodburner. This goes straight in from plates or whatever as necessary.

Plastic, glass, tins, foil, cardboard and other paper is collected fortnightly by council. Again we have an old swing top bin in the garage for everything but the paper and cardboard which go into bags supplied by the council which are emptied and returned after they collect. Because everything has to be rinsed and clean before it is thrown, there is no need for a liner in the bin. It just gets rinsed out if necessary.

Anything else is given away, sold, taken to local recycling facility or as a last resort, goes into an old builders bucket in the garage and then out to the general waste bin, again collected fortnightly (we actually have a weekly collection but one week it's general waste and the next week it's recycling and garden waste). We generate at most a bucket of general waste per week and again, it is rinsed out if necessary.

None of the separating "bins" are too heavy or large to be a problem carrying outside to bin or wherever and it's something we do at our convenience. If the kids want to score brownie points with us, they offer to do it! Except for the composter, they really don't like that.

It's easy when your local council provide you with a service such as ours, our garage is accessed from a door in the kitchen and you can burn or compost. I realise that our routine is possible because of this. It came home to me when we were on holiday last summer on a campsite without recycling facilities. It seemed so weird to just put everything in a bin liner after a year of separating our waste and it made us realise how much our habits had changed in a short time.

Good luck!

TGR

[Sunbeam]

I never thought about a bucket - DOH ! we also have chooks who get all the goodies leftover from the table -and I recycle as much as poss (cambs has finally got off their butts and are collecting plastics from October - we take a car load down to the recycling point every two months or so) - our black wheelie goes out 1/4 full...(because we recycle - not because the bag's split and I've left it all on the kitchen floor!!

Will hunt out a suitable bucket asap!