Help and feedback please

[giraffe]

With five of us the general bin is full after a fortnight. After all that's equivalent to a single person waiting 70 days to have their bin emptied! Everything is fornightly here and they alternate green bin (garden waste) & recycling one week and the general bin the other. But you aren't allowed to put veg peelings in the green bin, hence the new food bin. I have a big binbag's worth of plastic, milk / ketchup/ shampoo/ squash bottles, and the plastic containers from butter / yoghurt pots etc each fortnight. They have made it so complicated, shredded paper has to be sealed in an envelope, card goes in a separate box from paper (when does thick paper become card?)

I've been looking at recycling bins and they are all so small. I think you are meant to empty them into a bigger container, but I have nowhere to store the bigger container! I've also been looking at school storage and I am coming to the conclusion it is exactly what I need. Big plastic boxes in a nice rigid wooden frame.

[Bunnylump]

Flipping recycling drives me mad. I want to do it because I like to care for the environment (eg you will recall that I went to endeless trouble to build a grass hardstanding for the cars on the front rather than concrete - which incidentally now looks awful because the grass won't grow on it - ask Scurra - he suggested I should fill in all the little squares now on show with a mosaic...

BUT I have a minicule kitchen, so have no room at all for any recycling boxes. As a consequence, the back door is a continuous mess off cardboard waiting to go out for recycling, washed out tins and jars on the windowsill and a tupperware thing with peelings and things in it. It looks DREADFUL but it is totally impractical to take things round the side of the house every time something is generated.

Oh, and while I'm on my recycling soapbox, someone please tell me how it is environmentally sensible to be using heat to melt down glass bottles to make...um...glass bottles?? Surely, the old method of getting a couple of pence back by returning bottles to the shop for reuse as the same kind of bottle was MUCH better??

[giraffe]

Our council have just replaced all the recycling lorries with new recycling lorries. How is THAT environmentally friendly? And the old ones weren't old.

Perhasp you could fill the holes with astroturf in your parking area? (I have visions of you cutting one inch squares of it out)

[Bunnylump]

Ooh cripes!! That really WOULD be tacky, wouldn't it??