Hands up who hates recycling!

I don’t actually mind recycling stuff, but I’ve just been barked at by The Boss for trying to put a (thoroughly cleaned) butter tub into the Greeny Bin.

If it was all plastic, I would have been legal. But as it was a plastic lid on a waxed paper tub, I might have been arrested and heavily fined…

So what IS allowed?

You can put plastic tonic bottles in, but not their lids, apparently. Likewise milk containers. Why not? And you can’t put plastic ice-cream tubs in although, as previously mentioned, plastic butter tubs are OK (for those who prefer plastic butter). Is cellophane allowed? I’ve never seen it mentioned. Likewise the plastic wrapping on ‘House of Bath’ and ‘Cotton Traders’ catalogues.

In our area, we’re banned from binning shredded documents: it seems that our vastly expensive recycling plant can’t cope with little bits of paper any more. So how do I combat the risk of identity theft?

We used to be allowed to put garden rubbish into our Greeny Bin the day after the normal ‘green’ collection… as long as it ‘wasn’t too heavy’. For who? I’m guessing that what’s too heavy for me probably wouldn’t be for a female Russian shot putter. Now we have to pay extra for a Brown Bin if we want to get rid of surplus vegetation. We’re actually permitted to put one bag of garden rubbish into our Black Bin, but neither size nor weight is mentioned at all. I suppose it could be as big as the bin or, alternatively, it might have been banned since I last looked.

We have also been allocated a yellow ‘bottle bag’, which goes out once a month. It’s of sufficient size to cope with about a week’s worth of glass, which makes it about as much use as a chocolate teapot. However we can now apply for a cute Red Bin which holds about two months’ worth of bottles which we don’t have to pay extra for, unlike the profiteering Brown Bin.

We do use a free compost bin (two, to be precise), but I get into trouble there as well. Occasionally I unwittingly manage to put stuff in that ‘ruins everything’. A bit like when, trying to be helpful, you forgetfully put something red in with a white wash. Or weed out a valuable plant that’s ‘obviously’ not a weed. It’s safer not to bother.

Oh, and our bins HAVE to be placed on the perimeter of the property, or else they won’t get emptied: do we mark this out with shaving foam like Premier League referees at a free kick?

I would love to have the space and distance from neighbours to build a decent bonfire, like my Grandpa always had.

On it I would heap all the bloody recycling regulations I could find, along with obnoxiously smelly items that my neighbours could enjoy almost as much as I do their (unnecessarily frequent) barbecues...