I can't speak for everyone, but most of my glass comes from Tesco, delivered to the door. As it happens, a Tesco delivery costs about the same as a Panda bin lift, and it seems to me Tesco are doing a fair bit more work for it than Panda. It seems reasonable that for the money they charge Panda would provide a kerb-side glass collection service, like waste collectors in other countries do.


Personally, I've been pretty fastidious about noting the instructions for waste sorting. Not my fault that they've changed over the years without much effort to update the customers. I suspect Panda have been complicit in this lack of education, judging by pm1977's post above. Doesn't surprise me, judging by how opaque they are about their charges. The lassie on the phone today listed the brown bin charges (standing, per-lift and per-kilo) -- I'm sorry I forgot to ask her why they couldn't be listed on their website.

Not really. Most waste collectors in Dublin (Ireland?) use single-stream recycling, which people tend to find is less hassle than source separation.

wiki wrote :

And in case anyone thinks that recycled material is lucrative:


I believe that metal is the most valuable material. Recycling of lower value, bulky material becomes less viable the further you need to transport it.

I would actually like it if waste collection companies gave a detailed list of what should be recycled, in addition to the more general list they currently give out.

edit to remove sentence fragment.

What other countries? I've never noticed it on my travels.

If the full cost of the product (ecological, environmental, health, dumping etc) was included in the equation it might look a bit different. Also worth noting that plastic resins are used in a lot of applications where the material cost component is so low that a other materials can easily be justified (for example plastic bags, drinks bottles etc).

Absolutely.

Uh, how much have you travelled (just kidding)?
How about the UK? Here's the specific borough I was in:

http://www.reigate-banstead.gov.uk/info ... _container

Glass bottles/jars/containers go in the grey (mixed recycling) bin.

Anyone know of any guidance for treating bins for insect control? I've Vapona'ed the grey bin a few times in summer to keep down flies and their larvae, and it's quite effective within such a confined space. Looking forward to it being more sanitary with separation of brown waste, but I expect the brown bin to need regular zapping due to the concentration of food waste and lower collection frequency. Pyrethroids (i.e. almost all insect killing products) generally break down in a few days, but I'm wondering about any negative effects on compostability of waste. Not that I'm that fussed -- if you're gonna make me store rotting waste for weeks on end, I'm sure as hell gonna poison the shit out of anything making its home in it.

I don't do anything to my brown bin and only put it out for collection every few weeks. It's unpleasant inside but the lid is so close fitting it doesn't make the area smell.

I came late to the discovery of a small unlined kitchen countertop caddy that gets emptied daily and washed up after the dishes. The food isn't in it long enough to rot.

Before that I used a ~25 litre pedal top bin with liner which was faffy and disgusting.

@ps: as far as disinfecting goes, the most powerful stuff I've used is F10SC veterinary disinfectant, diluted at 500:1. It costs maybe €60/litre in bulk. If you wanted to actually sterilise the contents of an entire 120L brown bin, that would cost €14, which is madness. So then you're into powerwashing the residues which is a nasty job (unless you pay someone to do it).

I guess I could just chuck the food waste into my 30 year old septic tank. Is that a good idea or legal? I'm guessing not.

lot of frustration here, some with specific suppliers.
For what it's worth, I've found City Bin to be pretty good, and their documentation and communications pretty clear (no affiliation, but a customer).

Some of the rules make sense once you think of the waste handling that has to happen at the sorting centre. Glass in the green bin will become shards of broken glass and a safety risk to anyone processing that waste. If someone really really wants to put glass in the bin, then I'm sure I could design you a machine to pulverise the glass to (more or less) sand and you could use it to amend your compostables, or use it to grit your footpath in the winter.

I've definitely, inadvertently, violated the rules though. e.g. putting stones and small quantities of rubble into black bin. Another angle is that some food packaging can have a recycling triangle with a line through it, as if it cannot be recycled, when in fact it often can be. They often take a lowest common denominator approach, but depending on the recycling operation they can process more/less materials.

Rubble reminds me of something a builder did to a family member's bin. He'd done work on a rental property, and had some cement left over. he dumped the unset cement into the black bin, filled it about a quarter. That's definitely not what's allowed (Certainly once set!) and makes bin very heavy indeed (so not a good idea to do that e.g. as an analogy of putting a brick in your toilet cistern )

Also, I suppose it's obvious, but if any of you have kids and end up with a birthday party: be sure and put the helium balloons into the bin early, no matter how much crying it causes. As the helium leaks out of the balloon, the buoyancy effect naturally reduces, which will increase your waste charge (but I can confirm that nomatter how many balloons you throw out you can't get the "meter to run backwards")

Well Panda certainly didn't hang around. Brown bin appeared in the garden today, within about 18 hours of phoning them. I suppose they're gonna make a killing on it, so why wait.


Awesome idea. Let's see, air is 78% N2 (molecular weight 28), 21% O2 (molecular weight 32), 1% Ar (atomic weight 40). That works out to an average of 29 grams per mole. Helium has atomic mass 4. Each gas has the same volume per mole at equal pressures. So helium is 86% lighter than air. Typical density of air at sea level is 1.225 grams per litre at 15°C. Brown bin is 140 litres, so we can displace 140 * 1.225g * 86% = 148g. That's a whole seventh of a kilo! ...maybe even a few grams more in cold weather. Of course, your bin has to be completely full of helium which doesn't leave much room for waste, though I guess five ounces of potato peels doesn't take much room. As a free bonus, any fly larvae will suffocate and the adults probably can't get airborne (or helium-borne) in the low density atmosphere.

There may still be a fly in the ointment though. Does the bin truck flip the lid before it weighs the contents? And would the bin collectors notice themselves talking in squeaky voices? Also, a binful of expanded helium costs about 35c (US bulk prices, not including transport or tankage) which is a dozen times the waste charge on the 0.15 kg of displaced weight. I think vacuum pumping might be more feasible, but you'd need a specially reinforced bin. I guesstimate a surface area of about 2.5 sq. metres, for an integrated pressure of about 26 tonnes ... the lid alone would incur more than five tonnes so the bin lorry might struggle to open it which kinda defeats the purpose

You have no worries there. Pyrethroids break down very quickly precisely because they're easily metabolised by soil microbes. That's why you have to spray them directly on leaves and stems as insecticides, since once they're on the ground, they're more or less useless, being decomposed before they get to the roots. They're highly toxic to arthropods, pretty seriously toxic to fish, amphibians and molluscs, slightly toxic to reptiles and birds and essentially harmless to mammals. As long as you're not cultivating millipedes and woodlice intentionally in the bin to eat your waste, you have no worries.
You can safely eat a bunch of pyrethrum flowers if you like, though they do taste foully bitter.