My local council provides four different wheeled bins for different types of waste - glass and cans, paper and card, compostable waste and one for anything else. These take up quite a bit of space at the front of your house, and if you store them somewhere else, will require four trips to move them all.

Before the recycling initiative, all of a household's waste had to fit into one bin, so it seems unlikely that a household could even half-fill one of the recycling bins.

I suggest a general waste bin and a recycling bin, the latter divided into three vertical sections with three independent lids. When people come to collect the rubbish, they lock two of the lids with a simple toggle or similar mechanism and empty the rest into the rubbish truck.
-- Srimech, Sep 19 2008

Not a bad idea. On the other hand, most councils in the UK now seem to collect rubbish only when Halley's comet returns - and even then only one of the several different bins. We find that all our bins fill up by the time the next collection is due (if not, we buy additional stuff to fill them, since we want to get what little value there is out of our rubbish service.)

I have a better plan: if the local council is so mad keen on recycling, let them do the bloody work. Give me one big bin, collect it twice a week, and give some otherwise unemployable person the merry chore of washing my used biros for composting.

Or let them pay me for my neatly- sorted and compartmentalized waste.

That wasn't a rant.

OK, it was. But still.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Sep 19 2008


AND another thing. Despite having recycled for several years now, I have NOT received my whale.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Sep 19 2008


Our recycling service (Seattle area) has a machine to sort the recyclables. We just throw our paper, cardboard, glass, metal, and plastic into one big bin and let the machines do the work.
-- scad mientist, Sep 19 2008


This is baked in most councils near where I live. Most recently, however there has been a move away from the divided bins to a single-compartment recycling bin for all recyclable waste. Much like [scad]'s area.
-- reap, Sep 20 2008


We use a single bin for all recycling, but (oddly) we can't place waste inside waste (say a vegetable can inside a cereal box) so I guess there's a machine doing some sorting somewhere.
-- phoenix, Sep 20 2008


Local uber-council has moved to recyclables for quite awhile now; originally we had blue(glass/plastic/metal) and grey(paper) open bins which were stackable and fit under the sink but they've recently mandated usage of various sized lidded bins which makes the entire city look like a ghetto: there's nowhere to put the things. The smallest sized wheeled bins take up twice the room of the original open bins and hold about a third as much.
The reason for the change ? Apparently "hooligans" were going around picking up cans and paper from the bins to make a little eating money; the nerve of some people, eh.
-- FlyingToaster, Sep 20 2008


Baked! The council next to mine has divided bins, though not with the divided lids, so I can't work out how it works at all. If they had divided lids, then they would have to pay some guy to fix the toggles and councils are cheap! A bun for the lid idea
-- penguin_tummy, Sep 20 2008



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