The nine-bin nightmare: Families forced to follow green zealots' new recycling diktats

Families are facing a nightmare future of recycling confusion.

In a regime set to spread across the country, residents are being forced to juggle an astonishing nine separate bins.

There has already been a storm of protest with warnings that the scheme is too complex and homes simply don't have the space to deal with the myriad bins, bags and boxes.

Paper and magazines go in blue bags, garden waste in a wheelie bin with a brown lid, while glass, foil, tins and empty aerosols should go in a blue box, with a grey wheelie bin for non-recyclable waste.

The strict regulations have been introduced as councils come under growing pressure to cut the amount of household rubbish they send to landfill.

However, they go far beyond anything previously expected from householders and families.

Retired teacher Sylvia Butler is already being forced to follow the new rules.

She said: 'I'm all for recycling and used to help educate the kids about it during my geography classes but expecting us to cope with nine different bins and bags is asking too much.'

Pressure on councils to enforce recycling schemes includes rising taxes on everything they send to landfill and the threat of European Union fines if they fail to hit EU targets from 2013 onwards.

Compulsory recycling is commonly enforced by bin police who can impose £100 on-the-spot fines for breaches like overfilled wheelie bins, extra rubbish left out, or bins put out at the wrong time.

If people do not pay the fines, they can be taken to court, where they face increased penalties of £1,000 and criminal records.

Officials in Newcastle-under-Lyme in North Staffordshire anticipated trouble when they introduced the nine-bin system last month.

They had to publish step-by-step instructions on how to fold down a cardboard box so that it fits into the green bag.

The council also put a film on its web-site in which a recycling officer demonstrates how to put a tenth container - a biodegradable liner - into the slopbucket.

This is the grand challenge of recycling. How to sort the trash?

Is it really cheaper and more reliable to get citizens to sort it themselves? It's not hard to imagine a lot of people getting this mixed up and throwing waste in the wrong receptacle. Surely this then forces the recycler to verify that all the waste in the plastic bin is actually plastic. So if paid staff have to inspect the plastic anyway, how much harder is it to get paid staff to sort it?

I keep feeling that there has to be a better solution to this problem, because nine bins is ludicrously more complex than the one bin solution people are accustomed to.

That is a rubbish idea. *wink wink*

The people of Britain are capable of recycling however, having it shoved down our throats and being told if we don't cooperate we get fined is extremely harsh

I could tell this was the Daily Mail just from the tone of the story, so I went to their website *gasp* and it was the headline story.
...

Where I live we follow a three bin system and it seems to work just fine.

I find that by and large the people of Britain are lazy, we don't do something if it inconveniences us for ten seconds.

Funnily enough, my Dad wanted to throw an old broken Playstation out today, just in the bin. I said he should take it to the tip to be recycled, and he basically replied with "Why bother?"... At which point I started citing to him how much resources go into computers and why we shouldn't just throw electronics away. (Did you know that Gold is 17 times more concentrated in electronic waste than it is in mined ore?)

The point is, he wanted to just throw it away because it would save him ten minutes of his time, even though the facility for recycling exists.

I can imagine a lot of people I know not bothering to recycle.

In my local area, we have three bins. One for all recycling materials, one for non-recycling, and one for compost.

That's it. Not confusing at all. Our local authority deals with the sorting of all the recycling materials.

Yup, same system we have here. Obviously I have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, but it seems to work fine.

It's not the British, it's the whole universe. Even flowing water and orbiting electrons take the path of least resistance.

So the trick is to indulge the laziness and design systems that are easy to participate in.