council budget tight but yellow lines must stay

[Topdad]

theyn would if they could lol

[Swarfcut]

 Time for a rare Swarfyrant  on the unintended consequences of council actions.

     Here in Suffolk the fortnightly bin collection includes a bin for "Green Waste" This suits us as we can dispose of garden clippings, weeds, and kitchen waste, such as peelings.  Food waste could also go in this bin, and all this material was supposedly composted on an industrial scale. but things have changed recently and now food waste of any sort is not allowed. We have never put cooked food waste in this bin, and now this is also banned anyway under the new rules.

    So, when does compostable vegetable material become food waste? Seems the short answer is if it's been near a kitchen.  I can put an apple, windfall or fresh off the tree into the bin. Peelings are classed as food waste and can't go in. Apple core?  Well we haven't tested that one yet, but a banana skin last week got the "Sorry we can't empty your bin as it contains prohibited material" sticker.

   The irony here is that I can contribute to global warming with an unnecessary trip to the tip and dump the bin contents in the green waste skip, from where it will presumably enter the same waste  processing stream as the bins from doorstep collections.

   To have a dedicated food waste  collection and anaerobic digester energy recovery system would solve this once and for all, but that's too simple, costs money which would take resources from other worthy schemes, such as the chief executives  pay and pension package.
 
  East Suffolk Council are the brains behind this new innovation, Food Waste now goes into the remaining "Don't care what goes in here bin" and is incinerated...Good for disposal and energy recovery, or on to landfill. Suffolk has no kerbside glass collection either, so those "less inclined" to  even go to the bottle bank simply put the glass in this bin, along with the scrap metal, small electricals and other junk that could be recycled.

 For your amusement, a bin with garden clippings, windfall apples and  banana skins.   I'll pick the banana skins out, see if that does the trick.

    Jobsworths? Yup. An email reply to my request for further guidance on the finer points deemed store bought apples as unacceptable, garden apples were OK. They thanked me for my continual support. By that I assume my direct debit for Council (Property) Tax is something that they can look forward to on a regular basis. Unlike my green waste bin collection, which is a paid for service not included in the Council Tax Levy.

    Swarfy

 Additional.  The local tip charges for rubble disposal. In these parts we have numerous house renovations. The council are increasingly worried about the cost of clearing fly tipping. As the saying goes "It don't need a genius". The tip has for years also closed on Wednesday......tough if you forgot. These days it's by appointment only. Good luck with that, then.

[groily]

Beyond parody, you couldn't make it up. Why oh why is it all so hard???? Don't blame you for the rant - sensible comments more like.

Here, glass, paper and tin cans & cartons go into big containers in the village. A two km trip each way every week or two, and no getting away from that, has to be done right. People do it right, too. Oh, and the big wossits get EMPTIED, so there is room always.

Other household stuff, including food waste, goes into a big brown wheely-bin for weekly collection in summer, fortnightly in winter when it's less smelly (I think. Herself knows about that stuff better than me.)

If it's legitimately burnable (ie garden waste), then bonfires are the OK normal out in the sticks fortunately. Otherwise, green wheely-bin.

Scrap man comes regularly for shed waste, dead batteries, swarf and so on. Private enterprise - they get to know who's likely to have stuff.

And then there's the big public tip for big stuff, but that's a trek and I hardly ever go there. Bit of a jobsworth in charge there, has to be said.

Net net of it is that there's hardly any illegal fly-tipping hereabouts, nor litter along the sides of the roads thankfully.  Even the often-maligned travelling people bag up all their stuff (mostly) and place it in sensible spots where the refuse people can cart it away.

It can't cost THAT much to do it properly, as 'here' is far from a rich place, but the modest investment is so very worth it. We get a small bill every year, to contribute towards it, along with a basic property tax calculated on sq footage and amount of land, plus a 'habitation' tax if the house is occupied. All combined, less by far than the annual charges on an equivalent property in the UK. Some things are done better elsewhere (although plenty aren't of course!)

[Greybeard]

My wife and myself don't generate huge waste. We have stuff collected every two weeks alternating between landfill, (black wheelie bin)  and recyclables, (plastic in a bag, unbroken glass items and metal in a box and paper and card in another box). We have a bin on the kitchen top for veg and fruit waste which when full goes to a compost bin or the wormery. The worm 'juice' gets drained off and put on the garden. Likewise the well rotted compost.

https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=726

[Rex]

    So, when does compostable vegetable material become food waste? Seems the short answer is if it's been near a kitchen.  I can put an apple, windfall or fresh off the tree into the bin. Peelings are classed as food waste and can't go in. Apple core?  Well we haven't tested that one yet, but a banana skin last week got the "Sorry we can't empty your bin as it contains prohibited material" sticker. 

People being people, and loving to push those barriers, I would say that refusing banana skins is fair enough. It's compostable but it's also food waste, and a banana skin one week becomes a gradual pile of kitchen waste as some won't be arsed to segregate stuff.
Brick rubble and plasterboard are the ones that get me; compacted and ground it's sold on for building purposes yet the tips charge to take it, and councils then wonder why lay-by's and country lanes are subject to fly-tipping costing us all more in clean-up costs.

[BSA_54A10]

It all comes down to the fact that virgin materials are too cheap
Thus recycling material costs between 2 to 3 times what brand new virgin material costs
All housholds should have a worm bin for kitchen scraps , cooked foods ( other than meat ) leafy garden waste .
FWIW I have 8 compost bins , all recovered from roadside shopping and 2 worm bins
The soft plastics go into old bread bags for recycling at the supermarket collection points
Thus I end up with 1 5 gallon bin of general garbage a month.
I strongly believe people should actively recycle their own wastes , then they might think twice about what they buy
Most curb side recycling is a con to make people feel good as just about all of it goes to landfill because the cost o sorting is way too high and the consequences of ineffecive sorting is higher still.
Used tin cans for instance can not be recycled due to contamination from the plating metal, the solder / glue used to seal the lid.
Polished paper can not be recycled because of the clay content in the paper
A tiny amount of glass in paper for recycling  renders the entire batch useless as you can not get the glass out
Plastics have to be sorted according to their chemistly anda tiny amount of the wrong plastic in a batch again renders the batch unuseable as well
For instance the little ring left over from a screw cap seal on a milk bottle or soft drink bottle  make the bottle unuseable but the cost of removing them is about 200 times the value of the plastic you are trying to recycle

Then we get to organics
A small amount of meat in green waste causes toxic bacteria to "infect" the entire batch and at worst will kill it and at best will slow down the bacterial break down of the vegetable matter which then becomes a problem because in a continious industrial process everything must be finished in a set time cycle .

Then there is problem of a council being a council
I will elaborate
Back in the 70's I believe Randwick council was the first to give away compost bins to households
This like most things councils do was a good idea, badly done.
The accountants audited the garbage and found that better than 50% was green waste, mostly lawn clippings .
Randwick had no tip & used an incenerator at Waterloo which was coming under community attacks for being dirty , smelly & dangerous .
So a spread sheet was commissioned to show that the cost of providing a compost bin to each household was 1/4 the average cost of burning the garden waste per household.
SO the original plan was to give every house 3 because in summer there would be 1 bin nearly finished, 1 bin processing and 1 bin being filled.
Then because it was a council all the barrow pushers came rushing in.
So first was an enviromental impact study of the adverse atmospheric effect of everyone doing what nature would have normally done if left alone.
Then a advertising campaign was needed and that had to be multi cultural, non sexist, non ageist and not dissability adverse
Then some one made the mistake of talking to the parks & gardens department's professional university graduate horticulturist who wrote the instruction book for creating the
perfect " compost .
By now the instruction book was in around it's 5th reprint and was so confusing no one could understand it and quite misleading
Thus when it came to actually distributing the bins, there was no more money left so each house only got 1 bin but you could get 3 more at cost price from the council chambers.

Remember the original plan was simply to stop people filling their garbage bins with grass clippings .
Now Joe average read the instruction and tossed "anything that was once alive " into the bin but did not appreciate that while the grass clippings would compost in a couple of weeks, that pair of denim jeans will take around 6 months to 2 years a newspaper would take at least 2 months unless shredded etc etc etc .
One bin only held 4 grass catchers full of clippings, but the grass clippings needed to be 2:1 with dry material or it turned into a stinky anerobic mess , thus withing the first year most garbage bins in summer were full of partially anerobically decomposed grass chocker full of maggots  so the residents tossed them out at the next clean up weekend

At one time I had 17 of them and was processing better than 3 tons of compost a year ( 6 standard 6x4 trailers full )

 

[BigJim]

Top marks for you there Trevor. I recycle everything i can but it does take some effort to do it properly. My mrs, bless her, is still unable to understand even the basics. Walking past neighbours' boxes they all seem to fail at something. I used to be really uptight about it all but cope better now. So long as we can dump it in the sea or landfill somewhere abroad then people in this Country just don't care, sad to say.

[Rex]

People do care, in my experience, but there must come a point for anybody where they think "feck it, I really can't take anymore of this caring". Look at the last 2 years, Covid, Afghanistan, illegals crossing the Channel unimpeded, people on furlough, inability to see doctors when necessary, shortage of gas, supposed shortage of meat, power and Christ know what else, idiotic old tw*ts gluing themselves to road surfaces and stopping patients getting to hospitals, the list goes on for ever.
It's no wonder some really couldn't care what happens to their kitchen waste...

[Swarfcut]

Rex. Don't include me amongst the don't cares. My original rant was why vegetable matter which composts, the very stuff GB's household segregates and no doubt turns into an excellent growing medium, should be rejected because of a blanket ban on food waste.

 If it's been cooked, or put on a plate, yes, food waste. Rancid pizza, KFC takeaway scraps, yes, very much so.  Potato peelings, stalks and leaves from fresh vegetable preparation, in my estimation certainly not food waste in the context of the requirements for composting material.
 In a bizarre twist, the rule is if it's been in a kitchen or is bought, its food waste. Shop bought Cut Flowers are a no-no. But if it's flowers from your garden, that's fine.

  Swarfy.

[Rex]

You've conflated my two posts there Swarfy. I never said or implied you didn't "care", just that delineation lines of what is/is not acceptable have to be drawn somewhere, and there's always going  to be anomalies.

[BagONails]

Interesting. Here in sunny Adelaide we're now told our kerbside organic waste collection is fine for kitchen waste too including meat products, they don't seem to mind. This is a relatively recent move as our green bins always used to be garden waste only. Now though, anything organic goes. Makes life a lot easier. There must have been some kind of step change in the composting techno whizz bang.  I'm not a fan of putting food waste in as the bin is only collected once a fortnight...If I do then I like to make sure it is well surrounded by grass clippings to avoid smearing the bin sides with stinky mess!

https://www.cityofadelaide.com.au/resident/recycling-waste/organic-waste/

I tried home composting but not very successfully.  We tended to be feeding the local river rat population and you don't want to encourage them as their chief predator is the Brown Snake, very toxic and can a bit aggressive. In addition our long hot summers here means stuff dries out and dessicates rather than composting unless you constantly wet the heap - it becomes quite a task. Humidity is virtually zero so even in the shade in still air (at 35C +) I can get a whole load of washing hung out and dry in 20 minutes on the line!

We have a yellow lidded wheely bin for all the plastic, tins, glass and cardboard etc but I doubt much of this is being properly sorted and recycled. A recent expose showed huge warehouses filling up all around the country after many east asian countries stopped "recycling" our waste. Now instead of sitting in huge heaps being picked over by the shite 'awks and young waifs in Indonesia we are having to deal with it ourselves, except we don't seem to have a plan as yet as to exactly how...

[Colsbeeza]

I have to get this topic back on track and BSA related.
I had to clean out my BSA tank last May. It was a bit rusty, so first needed to shake it full of rocks etc to remove the rust. But a shoulder injury prevented me from picking up the tank to do it by hand. A large compost tumbler was the answer.
I found an old but large Australian-made Osborne Metal Industries compost tumbler locally, which had a hatch large enough to get the tank through. Most are way too small.
But when wrapped in blankets it wouldn't fit through the opening, and the modifications needed weren't worth the effort and pain .  I still couldn't shake it by hand, so rocked the tank back and forth on a small trolley with rocks, screws etc.
I then used the electrolysis method using washing soda and a rinse with phosphoric acid instead which worked a treat.
So what to do with the BSA Tank Tumbler? The daughter-in-law didn't want it for composting as she already had one and it stood around for a month or so. The wife wasn't impressed at all, but she had a bee in the bonnet to get the garden back in shape, and so we have now put it to use as a Composter (of all things). The little grandson comes over once a week and now has a ritual of putting in the scraps and turning it over to look for worms. Another little greenie in the making, although I do drag him into the shed to look at the BSA too.
So all's well that ends well!
Col

[Colsbeeza]

Here is the tank- rattling trolley.
Col

[BSARGS650]

Mmmm...Apart from the sure things in life like death, taxes and the BBC delirious on golden salaries and pensions care of assured riches from us suckers....on can also be sure that council tax rise every year along with tight and restrictive budgets, but, the latest exotica motor car will grace the executives reserved parking space....