Recycling Questionnaire

[squirmelia]

This questionnaire is for my "design experience" which is happening for the next few weeks in a sub-basement. No cardboard convenience stores are involved this time though, apparently.

[Poll #1149982]

I forgot to add these questions, so answer them in Comments:
1. What do you think of Dusty Bin?
2. Submit photos or descriptions of your bins and where you keep them.

Thanks!

Comments

[nickmurdoch.livejournal.com]

1. What's dusty bin?

2. I can't take photos, it's dark out :(

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

1.

2. Don't you have a bin in your kitchen or in your house at all?

[deerfold.livejournal.com]

When I was little I always wondered why winning dusty bin as the booby prize was such a bad thing.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

The people in the picture certainly seem to like him!

[nickmurdoch.livejournal.com]

oh right, I thought you meant recycling bins :)

I have a "hidden" one under my sink in my kitchen where opening the cupboard lifts up the lid on it, I have one in the lounge (main living area), one in the bathroom, and I need to buy one for my bedroom. I have a separate smallish cardboard box in my lounge for recycling items.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I think we're interested in whether people have a main bin and a recycling bin in their kitchen or wherever, or a number of bins for different stuff, that kind of thing.

[bitchiekittie.livejournal.com]

I might have misunderstood, but when responding about clothing, etc, I counted reusing and repurposing (in addition to donating, when appropriate), which I try to do whenever creativity doesn't fail me too terribly.

and it's awful, but I don't have bins! I use a paper bag or cardboard box to collect all of my paper items and a plastic bag to collect the tin, plastic and glass (we have curbside pickup, and you can combine them all in one bag! you're supposed to only use the blue ones, but they don't seem to mind if you don't)

[bitchiekittie.livejournal.com]

when they get too full, I put the paper bags out under the back porch and the plastic next to the trash can (they won't attract bugs, as I carefully rinse everything!)

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I always get confused about clothes too.. they have clothes recycling bins, but I'm never sure if they are just donated to charity shops or similar or actually recycled, which to me somehow implies being squished up.

No bins.. hmm, well, I guess a bag or box counts really. :)

[tsuki-chama.livejournal.com]

1) That thing looks almost Barney-grade disturbing. I'm guessing I'm too young to remember it?

2) Our block (33 flats) has two of the big commercial recycling bins, along with three normal bins. They're outside the block at the back (four floors down for me, and not all that easy to get to when you have a buggy in tow as well! In the kitchen we've got a swing bin for the rubbish and a plastic bag (one of the big substantial ones you pay about 50p for) for the recycling.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

1. Apparently 3-2-1 ended in 1988, so probably!

2. I got quite lazy about taking the rubbish down when I lived in a block of flats, since it seemed so far away, so I can imagine it must be worse with a buggy, indeed!

[fluffymark]

Back at my parent's place the bin in my room IS dusty bin! :) :)

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

So, that's where he ended up! I did wonder.

[xgray.livejournal.com]

1. i don't even know him.

2. we currently use bins like these...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/xgray/450319039/

mostly for cans/bottle, etc and then paper it put in paper sacks, which are picked up weekly.

this fall austin, texas will be moving to using larger bins like these...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/xgray/589031923/

...which will be picked up every other week and you just toss everything in there. no separate containers required.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

1. I think it's probably a British thing? Yorkshire Television, 1978 - 1988 apparently. :)

2. What about inside your house?

[xgray.livejournal.com]

inside, i have a couple of stackable bins in a closet. one for paper and one for metal/glass/plastic bottles/cans.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking more about bins inside the house.. do you have photos of those? :) Do you have more than one bin to keep the fish in?

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Domestic bins, yeah! We're thinking RFID, glowing flowers, little planets, talking bins, graphs, pleasant dinging sounds and err.. I actually thought Dusty Bin was quite cool when I was a kid. :)

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Note: I only entered in "what have you recycled" what is possible over here because much more was possible in Germany.

Things that really bug me because I can't recycle them: cardboard (can only be put in green bin), yellow pages, tetra pak (although there is now 1! place in Cambridge that takes them) etc. The most stupid thing is plastic. We are only allowed to put plastic bottles into the bin, differently shaped objects aren't allowed, even if they are made from PE. The shape should not matter at all but the material. It's all shredded to be remelted so the shape is irrelevant.

Can you recycle organic waste? I mean, you can't make new apples from cores like you can make a new bottle from the shards of an old one.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Apple-shaped compost (like mud pies, I suppose?) painted green.. eww!

Stamps?

[psych0naut.livejournal.com]

By "stamps", do you mean postage stamps or rubber stamps? Because I recycle postage stamps all the time, but I've never recycled a rubber stamp.

Re: Stamps?

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I think postage.. can rubber stamps be recycled too?

Re: Stamps?

[psych0naut.livejournal.com]

I don't understand why there needs to be a separate category for postage stamps, since they're just paper. I toss used postage stamps in the paper recycling bin while still stuck to the envelopes they came on.

I do reuse (not recycle) postage stamps if the post office neglected to cancel them. Technically this is illegal in many jurisdictions (not sure about the UK), but it's not like they can tell, nor will they care about an individual doing this occasionally.

Re: Stamps?

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Nor me! It was just what was on Recycle Now (http://www.recyclenow.com) as a category. I think they just had it as a category, since you can also give them to charities instead of recycling them.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

To pick up one of kludge's comments:

There is far too much needless waste in the first place:
- Many things in supermarkets are wrapped several times (often in several kinds of plastics, those foam kinds being the worst kind).
- All bottles are one use only (except the ones from the milkman)
- Hundreds and hundreds of carrier bags. I always got odd looks when I arrive with my folding crate or rucksack but now I get tesco points. ;o)

Germany has always had a deposit system for glass (beer and soft drink) bottles and for many years (20?) for plastic soft drink bottles (the big 1l ones). It works brilliantly, you pick up a crate of full bottles, take them back when they're empty and pick up the next crate. The only waste generated is the bottle caps. There isn't even a need to recycle.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I actually saw a milk float yesterday! I think it had been some years since I last saw one, but they do still exist in Highgate.

Tesco points for using your own bag, yeah! It is nice that you can do that online as well.

Reusing glass bottles does seem much better, I agree.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

I've been getting my milk and OJ from Dairy Crest for about a year now. Made a big difference.

[fluffymark]

I've seen milk floats lurking down my road this year! Never seen them before in London, or even Cambridge for that matter. The milkman has never knocked on my door, so I still don't know how to order milk from the milk float, but they do exist! I don't exactly use much milk anyway, but it got me excited. :)

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

In response to hoshuteki: The windows on envelopes annoy me too.. I am always trying to tear them off. Although the lids on shampoo bottles annoy me more, since I always hurt my hands trying to pull them off.

[ptdc.livejournal.com]

1. 3, 2, 1. A local rubbish collection company is called Dusty Bin. They have a habit of parking their fully laden lorries up our road over the weekend, in the middle of summer. Grr.

2. STAY AWAY FROM MY BINS. Foo.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

1. Does the ghost of Ted Rogers drive the lorries?

2. But we're just trying to make them cooler!

[ptdc.livejournal.com]

1. Nope :(

2. Ok then, you may continue!

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

1. I am old enough, but don't remember anyway!
2. No camera, but we keep the green and black bin out the front, just behind the gate, and the recycling boxes in the covered side passage. Except for right now, because I've been too lazy/busy to bring the green bin and blue box in today, so they're sitting on the verge outside.

I recycle so much...

[bickichick.livejournal.com]

I started a recycling scheme when I w orked at my old job and have one in place now @ new job

here is a list of Victoria's recycling from teh CRD capital regional district http://www.crd.bc.ca/waste/recycle/index.htm

I recycle cardbaords tubes from paper towel and toilet papers
what is/ are white goods?

I'll send you pics of my garabage cans sure.

oh I can talk on recycling for ever

[bickichick.livejournal.com]

I recycle stamps I save them then take them to the Canadian Cancer Society and they take them to somewhere and they get X number of dollars and thet goes to Cancer Dressings for those in need.
2 years ago the CCS raised just under $2000

[messy-hair-girl.livejournal.com]

My number one favorite method of recycling in Baltimore City is the magic of the alley. You can put almost anything in your alley and some guy will come along with a shopping cart and take it. He might sell the furniture for a few bucks, leave the books at the book drop, and then take any metal to the metal recycling place for a few dollars.

The downside is that the guys grabbing up the stuff are ususally addicts or homeless who need more help than picking up my old toaster, but the upside is that they get a few dollars for my old things and nothing goes to waste.

The regular recycling in the city is tough. I'm in a poor-ish neighborhood and these folks are having a hard time keeping on the lights and keeping the kids fed. They don't really think of recycling because that's something "rich white people" worry about. As a result, the city trucks that are supposed to pick everything up will skip whole blocks since only one or two people my put their recycling out.

Now we have "single stream" recycling so you can put paper, cans, bottles, and anything that might possibly be recycled into one bin. The recycler makes enough money that they'd rather get more of your stuff and have to sort it out themselves. I think this will help make things a lot easier.

Stupidly, the city handed out special bins but only at certain locations and certain times. Who's gonna get on a bus to go pick up a recycle bin? Stupid. They should have just dropped one at every house in the darn city.

[messy-hair-girl.livejournal.com]

Also, my favorite recycled object is my lawn mower. My dad made it from a broken gas powered mower and a broken electric. We call it Frankenmower. Parts of it are probably forty years old but it works great and currently lives at my house.

[billyabbott.livejournal.com]

I have a running battle with my kerbside recycling guys - each week I put out things that the leaflet I have says they'll take and they leave them. Eventually they'll take my old shoes and a big metal saucepan, but until then the battle continues.

I recycle pretty much everything I can, which makes my kitchen a bit of a mess because I leave most of the dissovable stuff in there until recycling day and then forget to take it out. I also don't recycle food stuff if it's raining as the food bin is outside.

The lovely people of Ealing council have given me a green box (with not enough water letting out holes in) and a green handled square bucket with a lid for food waste and pick them both up every week on a Tuesday. I did fill in a survey last year asking about how I'd like things to change, including combinations of regularity of collection and size, shape and number of bins, but as yet nothing has changed. They do a pretty good job though now and pick up most stuff, although they like to leave big piles of cardboard out in the rain, but I ascribe that to spite.

I tried to recycle a microwave once but they wouldn't take it at the dump, so it's still sitting in my kitchen, now acting as a "paper to recycle" podium.

[billyabbott.livejournal.com]

And I'm scared of Dusty Bin's fixed expression of happiness. Ted Rogers is up there for unnatural manual dexterity and his similar expression.

[grey-area.livejournal.com]

Ah, forgot about this part. Dusty Bin...yeesh. Annoying character with a moronic expression and overly negative connotations that would make reviving it as an icon for recycling more difficult. And my bin is a standard under-sink-with-bags-in unit that feeds a big black wheelie bin. Iceland does not have a recycling scheme that involves collection from your home. Instead, they have glass and paper/cardboard collection bins all over the city, and you can also take your recyclable goods to the Sorpa (http://www.sorpa.is/en/user/home) where you can offload pretty much everything. Some things cost you money to dump, but most things are free. Or become free if you don't act like a jerk, which results in the guy handling the money-taking to tear up your chit and tell you that now you're going to count to twenty before you walk out of the hut to make it seem like there is some sort of transaction going on.

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

60 people responding!

You are well loved, and well read!

[battlekitty.livejournal.com]

This hits on a gripe I have with my council, which I need to ring and comlain about. Again.

I threw about 2 months of recycling in the bin last week due to the arson attack on the only recycling centre in walking distance of my flat (which is run by Tesco's, not the council. Oh, and my flat is in one of about 6 blocks in the immediate vicinity of Hendon Central Station. We have no ground area for our own on-site collection point as we're above shops and we aren't allowed individual bins because we're flats. And they don't recycle plastic.)

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

dusty bin = very camp
my bins: exterior
non-recyclable: green wheelie bin in front drive
recyclables: green wheelie bin in front drive, same size as non-recyclable, blue lid
kitchen/garden waste: black polyethylene(?) compost bin in back garden. Came from council at minimal outlay and was delivered

my bins: interior (main)
non-recyclable: yellow 50l dustbin with lid in kitchen, lined with black bag
recyclable: 25l swing-top bin in kitchen, unlined
kitchen waste: 5l grey square bucket, came from council free with compost bin, lined with biodegradeable bin liners that were supplied with it
Misc. wastepaper bins in ever room, lined with carrier bags

[solitarywalker.livejournal.com]

i don't know what carrier bags or white goods are, so i might recycle them but just call them something else.

i don't know what Dusty Bin is.

Recycle bins are next to the dumpster in the parking lot behind the building.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Carrier bags are plastic bags. White goods are things like fridges, freezers, etc.

Dusty Bin was a character on a British game show in the 1980s.

[solitarywalker.livejournal.com]

i usually reuse carrier bags (as trash bags, for cat litter, etc.) but sometimes i recycle them. i never throw them away empty.

i didn't know white goods could be recycled. If you buy a new appliance, the old one is usually hauled away by the seller; what they do with it i don't know.

[teatagg.livejournal.com]

1] Dusty Bin needs a vacuum cleaner.

Then he and Henry could keep each other clean. They could even get a room together and well...

2] Communial bin area in the carports below. Gets chaotic at time.