29. Rubbish decision? The shift to monthly bin collections

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James Piper: Hello. welcome to Talking Rubbish, a weekly podcast delving deep into the world of recycling and discussing the truth behind snappy headlines and one sided stories. In this episode we will discuss how garden waste is recycled, explore whether council should move to monthly collections. Our old glasses, as in specacles, rubbish or not. And how clean does our recycling actually have to be? I'm James Piper for Of the Rubbish Book and I'm joined by Robbie Staniforth, my far from rubbish friend. Hi, Robbie.

Robbie Staniforth: Hey, James.

James Piper: I've had complaints.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, yeah?

James Piper: Yeah, people have been writing in.

Robbie Staniforth: I mean, people complain all the time, don't they? Are these different complaints?

James Piper: These are different complaints, yeah.

Robbie Staniforth: Glowing reviews. Actually, it's not too many complaints.

James Piper: For once it's not about your laugh.

Robbie Staniforth: no, that is a common complaint.

James Piper: I don't think you should stop. Keep being you, Robbie. Keep being you. no, this is actually about our intro. I actually was with someone the other day and he thought our intro was like pre recorded. As in the, hello, welcome to Talking Rubbish.

Robbie Staniforth: Y hand thing.

James Piper: Yeah. Then he turned to me and went, your hello was very bad this week. It was just like a normal hello. It was like, hello, welcome to Talking Rubbish.

Robbie Staniforth: Okay. And he was expecting that low high thing you dolo.

James Piper: Exactly. It turns out I've got a little catchphrase. I didn't even know I was doing it. But having someone say, oh, look, I wasn't happy, made me realise how much people liked that hello. So I can confirm, from now on, no more subpar hellos. We're gonna always have a really dramatic hello.

Robbie goes to Glasgow to see a new reusable cup scheme

now, I went to Glasgow this week, Robbie.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, yes. Y Exciting.

James Piper: Yeah, it was very exciting, yeah. I went up to go and see this borrow cup scheme.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah.

James Piper: And it was great because they were actually on well last night, actually, because as we'recording this, they were on the one show. So that's a good promo.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, very good promo.

James Piper: It's a reusable cup scheme that's been created by Reposit and Hubbub, who we both know really well. And we'vely had Hubbub on episode 15, if you want to listen to that. And, this is the scheme that we were helping to put together when I forgot my reusable cup for the meeting. Oh, yeah, I remember for months I've been talking about working on a reusable cup scheme and it was this one. and, yeah, really good. So you go in. I arrived Glasgow Central train station, went into the local Costa. They asked me if I wanted my coffee In a borrow cup. I thought, brilliant. Cost a pounds. So they put a pound through the till and then when you want to return it, you just scan a QR code and they send you a pound voucher, to be used in any of the outlets. And it'currently it's in lots of independence. So, over in Glasgow and it's also in Costa, Ah, Cafe Nero and Burger King. And I was astonished, I mean, I was astonished at how many Cafe Nero se. Costas are in Glasgow city centre.

Robbie Staniforth: Everywhere I looked, just within a square mile. They're everywhere.

James Piper: I think there's something like. I think we were looking up, it was like 11 Cafe Neros.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, really?

James Piper: Within that, like, square mile. Unbelievable. Yeah.

Robbie Staniforth: So really.

James Piper: Yeah. Really good brands to be associated with because obviously they were promoting it very heavily. Anyway, this has made me think we need to do a few episodes on coffee cups. I know that people keep asking us about coffee cup recycling and we've got lots of examples of these reusable cups schemes that would be worth us talking about. So I'm sort of planning a few episodes on coffee cups coming soon in the next few episodes. So look out for those.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, I mean, there'll be as much of a surprise to me as they will be to everyone else.

Robbie McFarland made his first TV appearance on Sky News

James Piper: Robbie, you have big news this week.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, yes.

James Piper: What are you doing?

Robbie Staniforth: I was on Sky News. Yeah. In the last few days. A sudden call up last minute to talk about, spoiler alert. Bristol's collections going to 4 weekly for their general waste.

James Piper: Yes. Now you say spoiler alert. Now we need to cover this off. This is a bit of an elephant in the room because in the last episode we said we're going to do a legislative update.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, that's right, we did. I think you promised it, actually.

James Piper: And then we did record that legislative update. So here's some behind the scenes for everyone. We recorded episode 29 a week ago and I listened back to it and I thought, oh, my goodness, Robbie, your mic's not working. Something's happened. And you sounded.

Robbie Staniforth: He said was, Robbie, you were awful. And then you caveatd it with the microphone.

James Piper: Yeah. You sounded like a robot. And I realised we couldn't put it out. We'never put out a subpar episode. Except for the subpar. Hello. never. So I said to you, we need to re record. And in the intervening few days we thought, actually, you've been on Sky News about this Four Weekly Collection. I've been on BBC Radio a couple of times about the Four Weekly Collectioneah. And if we're both asked to do media stuff. It has to be prioritised.

Robbie Staniforth: It's prior. It's got to be a prescient topic, hasn't it? Yeah.

James Piper: so this is a re recordd a week later, a drastic re record because your mic didn't work. And it's also a completely different trash talk. And how did you feel about your Sky News appearance?

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, yeah, okay. I know where this is going. Yeah. Basically, I learned it was a crash course in media training, because when the producer

00:05:00

Robbie Staniforth: said, you're in in about 20 seconds through the headphones, they just came to me live without doing any introduction. It was just a shot of my big head on the telly and I had only just finished taking a sip of tea as they cut to me. And so I looked like some sort of crazy lizard man with my weird lip smacking. And you could even see a flash of my tongue trying to clear my throat as we started. So not the greatest start to my first TV appearance.

James Piper: I'm going to put this on social media. We're going to dig out this clip. I'm. This whole discussion is going to be on social media. And right now, hold on, let's do this properly now. There will be a clip of Robbie lip smacking for us to look at.

Robbie Staniforth: Bad. I'm owning it. But it is bad. But then it did get better because just a few minutes later, when they actually cut to the presenter and the other lady who was appearing, their heads were quite small, so they were quite far back in the frame and I was quite close to my camera, so I just had this massive looking potato head and I very surreptitiously slowly leant back so my head returned to a normal size. So I was very proud of that. And, the last thing, which was the genius of an online or, TV appearance, I should say, is that no matter what the presenter asks, you always start with an Einstein quote because people might just be fooled into thinking you're halfway intelligent. So I was definitely riding on Einstein's coat tailes with my intro.

James Piper: And what quote did you choose?

Robbie Staniforth: the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.

James Piper: Very.

Robbie Staniforth: Or a take thereon. So it started very badly, it got a lot better. And then I'll let everyone else be the judge of whether it went downhill thereafter.

James Piper: I like, I feel like we should have gone quite meta and as you dialled into this podcast, you should have smacked your lips and started with an Einstein quote instead of Hearing me go, hello, they're just here.

Robbie Staniforth: E equ Mc Sared that would have definitely been for. For the hardened fans. Yeah.

James Piper: Additions and corrections.

Robbie says peach pads have been proven to be recyclable

We talked about peach pads I think was this episode 27 I think it was only a couple of episodes ago.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah. I remember the peach pad in the bottom of the punnet. Yep.

James Piper: I had someone on our Discord, someone called Recycling Geek. I liked their name. I mean I go by Rubbish Geek and so it's quite nice to have someone else there called Recycling Geek.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah. Is this someone pitching to be a new co host?

James Piper: Oh, oh, I'm up for it. A month for an evolution. I should reach out to them. So we have Recycling Geek or Discord and they had found a peach pad. So we'd said peach pads weren't recyclable. They're the things just as a reminder. They're the things that go in the bottom of your meat tray or fruit punne it that soak up the liquids. You know there s bits, they're sort of quite plasticky and we had said they weren't recyclable for a number of reasons and they had found one that had the OPRL label which we've talked about the Onpack recycling label that said recycle.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, wow. Okay. So there are some albeit niche ones.

James Piper: Maybe I quite like this. Quick corrections of. I found something, you know, someone's out shopping and they see something that we talked about. They're like quick snap this and send it to them. And so I had a little look and it turns out there are paper ones on the market. I think there's only one company who makes them. I'm not sure. the company that put them out there sort of came out and said but their quote was we're not aware of any other absorbent pad on the market anywhere in the world that has been approved for recycling. So this is a great steps forward. So I think this is quite unique. But this was back in 2023 so have there may be others that market but basically these are ped pads that aren't made of plastic, they're made of paper and so technically have been proven to be recyclable. Of course we had someone else on Discord did point out that we had only just talked about soaked cardboard with the hose pipe.

Robbie Staniforth: So these moist pads at the bottom.

James Piper: I'm not sure this is going to get dry enough to recycle but you know, it's got a recycle label. Someone's obviously done the work. So the company was silane, I think, sorry if I'm pronouncing that wrong, silane. And it was called the earth pad and it comprised of cellulose absorbent material with a paper outer layer. So well done for them for creating something that, in theory, is recyclable. And our advice, as always, is to look on the packaging for a label that says recycle or don't recycle. Because I can promise you, very, very clever people have done the work on, whether something is recyclable or not. And if it does have that recycle label and it says recycle, it means they've really thought about it. I guess the challenge with this is you probably wouldn't know its paper like. What it means is that next

00:10:00

James Piper: step of like. And which bin do you put it in? It's not obviously paper, these things. And so if you do see a peach pad that's got a recycled label on, I'd put it in the paper bin. The link for our Discord will be in our show notes, and that's a little forum where we all gather, talking about all the things that happen on the show and all that kind of stuff. So please join that. It'd be really great. We've got like 70 people there at the moment and we'd love to see more. So if you're listening to this, have a look at our show Notes where you can find our Discord link. And, come over there and have a chat to us about all the things we talk about. You can also follow us on social media, rubbishpodcast or emailalkingruubbishpodcast. Atmailt.com. this week is particularly important to follow us on social so that we can all see Robbie looking like a lizard. What an advert.

Robbie Staniforth: I'm gonna stitch up.

James Piper: I'm gonna cut that. Yeah, have that as the advert. Wa wantn see Robbie looking like a lizard. Tune into Talking rubbish. Doesn't help that you've got a bald head.

Robbie Staniforth: It definitely doesn't. Yeah.

James Piper: Very lizard eque.

We have a sponsor and our sponsor is Eco Surety

Anyway, as I mentioned last week, we have a sponsor and our sponsor is Eco Surety. We'd like to take a moment to thank them. When Robbie originally saw those notes, he did it like Fresh Prince of Bel Air. So we'd like to take a minute to, Thank you, Kurti. Who were on a mission to rid the world of unnecessary packaging. I shouldn't say. They help brands navigate the tricky world of extended produce responsibility. And that is not all. I can tell you that, because both Robbyie and I know this company very, very well. They also collaborate on incredible recycling projects and consumer awareness campaigns for those tough to ``ycle materials. And they are really big on consumer awareness which is why they've agreed to support and sponsor us. And we are so grateful to them. If you're an organisation looking to make smarter packaging choices, they've got your back. So you can check them out@ecosurty.com. rubbish process. I've started doing the rubbish process. Sort like hello, I've got that feedback on the hello. And now I'm like do I need to do that with all of it?

Robbie Staniforth: So I always need to talk like this on a podcast.

James Piper: Rabish, process.

Robbie: How are we reprocessing our garden waste

So Robbie, we talked last week about collecting garden waste and you went through all the different routes that we could collect our garden waste and obviously now we need to send it off for recycling. So how are we reprocessing our garden waste?

Robbie Staniforth: Well, first thing to say is we're composting. Woohoo. I'm no expert.

James Piper: Oh can I just say actually that has come up a lot. Not that you're. No. But we have had so many emails saying it'd be really good if you could get a compostable expert on and I have. I'NOT taking it personally. We both know our specialty is recycling, not compostible. Other people have realised that that's come across, decided that we need to. Yes. That we need to get a compbost work exper butt on. Say we'll add it to the list. We're definitely going to bring on some people who know all about wormries and composting and you know, just make this really good because I want to learn a lot more about it as well. It's my area that I don't really know.

Robbie Staniforth: Sure thing. So no pressure. I'm going to explain composting. So as we say caveats that we're no experts but here's the sort of the basics. the thing that I like most in doing the research for this was that people talked about it being nature's way of recycling, which I think is a lovely way to think of it. The nutrient cycle and the nutrients being returned from this kind of garden plant matter back to the soil and then hopefully to grow new plants again. But it isn't just about recycling, it's also about CO2. Oh okay there CO2 is a massive reason to be composting because if you use artificial fertilisers or peat based compost that's not good for the release of greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions. So it's a great way that people can reduce their carbon footprint. Fun fact. Peat bogs are more effective at storing CO2 than forests. So if we're digging up peat bogs to put them into compost bags and you see the peat based compost, very good for growing things, but not so good for the areas that have been scraped to make that compost, we should be leaving Pete in situ.

James Piper: So it's interesting, isn't it? We often think plant trees to help the planet and actually in some instances that's not the right way to go.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

James: There are two types of composting, at home and large scale

And now we have exhausted all of my knowledge on peat bogs, so we'll move on to actual composting. We're going to talk about two versions of reprocessing here, because we're in the reprocessing part of garden waste. There's obviously the at home stuff and then there's the large scale, composting. So first of all, home reprocessing, basically what you're looking to do is to create two piles of stuff, green stuff, things like lawn clippings, fresh kind of vegetation and also the brown stuff. So that's dry leaves, twigs, etc. The woody stuff.

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And you're going to mix these two piles, one part green to three parts brown in your compost. That's a rule of thumb. You don't have to be exact, but remember, you actually want a bit more brown waste than green. So if you're just exclusively putting lawn clippings into your composter, your struggle basically to get good compost.

James Piper: Okay, so that's interesting. I guess the question I have it. So lots of people write in saying you often talk about recycling. Yes. Funny, that's what we do. and rarely do. We talk about kind of combosting of like cardboard, for example. So when we talk about the difference between plastic and cardboard and we talk about cardboard being recycled, people say, hang on, say, why wouldn't you compost it?

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah.

James Piper: What does cardboard come under in this example? Is that brown or that would be brown dry?

Robbie Staniforth: No, no, you can consider a bit of cardboard to be brown and dry, and will help basically to absorb the moisture that is going to come out of all of the green stuff because it is green, because there's water left in it. You know how, lawn clippings dry out and eventually become brown, don't they, when they lose their water?

James Piper: Got it. Okay, great. Thank You.

Robbie Staniforth: So you're looking for about three parts brown to one part green. And you can use some foods, in the green. So, peel from vegetable scraps, fruit, coffee grounds, would kind of count. So those foods can go in, but definitely no meat, no dairy and no cooked foods because that's likely to attract pests rather than make for good compost. and you just need to find a shady spot. as you were saying, James, in your garden, you're just piling stuff up in a corner, aren't you?

James Piper: So, I normally cut my lawn and then I will pour the grass into the corner, but I use my green waste bin, my garden waste bin for my brown stuff. You know, leaves. When I collect up leaves and twigs and all that stuff, I put it in the garden waste bin. So I'm probably not helping my composting. And I'm goingna now make sure I put the brown in with the green. And if I'm not getting the right mix, I'll probably put the extra green into my garden waste bin. Yes, I'm going to change what I do, I think.

Robbie Staniforth: Ah, very good. So, yeah, you can just find a shady spot, but you could speed it up by getting, one of these compost bins and we talked about that in the last episode. Other ways to speed up that process is by chopping up the waste. You know, you don't have to use a saw necessarily, you can just use a spade to sort of hack at it a little bit and that will help speed things up and the decomposition of particularly the brown stuff. And if it starts to smell, people worry about smelly compost bins, waste rotting away. Usually adding some of that brown material will help, but of course the bin will help too. Having a lid on it definitely keeps, the smell in. And if you turn it, so you rotate it. So whether that's in an open shady spot or in the bin itself, if you can get in there and have a dig around and turn it over, that adds oxygen and will also speed up the process. you need to keep it moist. I mean, I don't think that's going to be a problem in the uk. Maybe at the height of summer, you might need to put a bit of water on it, or somehow collect the rainater and funnel it in. But time is definitely key and patience is key because it takes several months before the compost will be ready and you'll know it's ready when it's dark and sort of a rich colour.

Some home compostable packaging may not break down as you anticipate

But in terms of things to be watchful of, you mentioned, cardboard that can go in and in small amounts and will compost down. Whereas, compostable plastics that we've talked about on previous episodes. You're just going to need a bit of trial and error there. we've talked about the certification before, because some of it may not break down as you anticipate. So I'd do a bit of trial and error there.

James Piper: And once you get a piece of packaging that you know, does break down, say for example if you buy, I think grind coffee pods, they say their home compostible. Right. And I'm a bit sceptical. I kind of want to test that because they haven't got the certification from what I can see they might do. So apologies if they do, but, I couldn't see it on their website. You could then test it. You could say, wellly, I'll put that in for six months, see what happens. If it breaks down then, you know, you're good to go. But if it doesn't then you know that that's misleading and you don't need to do it. So the beauty of like home compostable packaging is you can test it.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, absolutely. You can test it yourself. And just be careful though because you don't want it splitting up and not able to pull it out and it's spoiling the batch. So I'll trust people to exercise their judgement there. And then finally, I haven't got time for all the alternatives. You mentioned Wormeures at the top. We'll definitely get someone onto the podcast in future to talk about those kinds of things. But another one is you can use those grass clippings that you were piling up, you can use that as mulch, for your garden. But by basically spreading it very thinly and letting it dry out, you really don't want it to become soggy and kind of claggy. So you want to dry out the glass grass clippings a little bit and you can use it like any old mulch.

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Robbie Staniforth: So that's the at home side.

Turning to large scale recycling, we discuss composting and Christmas tree recycling

Now turning to large scale recycling. And we touched on this a little bit with the Christmas tree recycling that we talked about in the Christmas episode or in the new year. this is basically all of the stuff that you either get collected in your garden waste bin or garden waste sack by the council or that you take to your local council site, and deposit, which is what I do, pil it up in the car and take it to U.S. civic community site. and they basically turn this into a soil conditioner. the material all goes to a composting facility. It gets sorted and screened for all the non compostable materials, including any packaging that might be mixed in there. It shouldn't be. and then it gets, deposited into these rows, these wind rows, which is, ah, like long thin mounds, parallel to each other. That allows the elements to get to the material and break it down. It's shredded, so that it's relatively small and turned quite frequently to allow oxygen to reach the microorganisms. And this is the part of the nutrient cycle. Those are the things, the bacteria and the fungus that's actually breaking down the waste. And you'll have all probably seen fields of steam, steam coming off fields. Well, that's because often this, the temperature of that composting is getting up to 60 degrees centigrade, which kills off pathogens and plant diseases and turns it back into useful compost. So this whole process takes four months. it's used by farmers, growers, gardeners. And another shout out for Bristol. Brilliant initiative. You can actually buy back the compost that is made from the garden waste that you get collected. So it goes off and it comes back. It meets a, British Standards Institute compost standard and you can buy it at relatively low cost in small bags or you can even get a bulk bag delivered. So I just thought that was a great initiative from the council. And imagine if we could buy other products made of recyclable waste that you sent off in, your general packaging recycling collections. I think that's a great idea. But certainly compost is one where you can see what happens to your garden waste.

James Piper: Thank you, Robbie.

Should councils collect general waste monthly or full weekly

And that will not be the last mention of Bristol because they are about to get their most mentioned since episode one in this week's Trash Talkaw. Are you ready to head over to it M? Let's go. Trash talk. We are asking the questions. Should councils, local authorities, cities, whatever you guys call it, we've got lots of international listeners, so they might not have councils. Should councils collect general waste monthly? And this is a big topic, big enough to get Robbie on Sky News, because Bristol are, consulting on this right now. You know, this isn't, a done deal, but they are consulting on collecting general bins once a month and we wanted to talk about why they might do this other than just cost saving and whether it actually has an impact on people's recycling. So we're going to start off, maybe not talking about Bristol, talk about the whole system, but inevitably we're going to have to get into this very specific topic.

Robbie Staniforth: Sure thing. The first thing to say, James, and it'd be remiss if I didn't, is that monthly is very different. Full weekly. And the sticklers out there, their ears will be pricking up saying, it's not monthly. It's too hard to remember the 6th of every month as your bin day. It's only generally ever four weekly that they do, rather than monthly.

Household recycling rates in England are about 43 to 45%

James Piper: This will bring me ont to a whole new rant about how all our months should be 28 days.

Robbie Staniforth: I think that's a different podcast.

James Piper: It's a completely different podcast. We would then align with the moon and every first would be a Monday. It's mad. Why do we have these anyway? Completely different podcast. But you are absolutely right. I mean, a lot of these stats are quite hard to find. You're going to hear this in a second, because one of the biggest frustrations with this episode is I have to trawl through all the council websites, working out what they do. And to do that you have to put a postcode in the postcode box. And so you have to look up a representative postcode. But of course, the representative postcodes is normally a city centre where they go, we don't do any bin collections here. So then you have to go on Google Maps to find, like a residential street that might be typical. And then you have to find his postcode and you have to do that again and again.

Robbie Staniforth: And this is some deep research.

James Piper: Why don't councils just say, this is how we collect fortnightly weekly. Why do I have to put the postcarde in anyway? Some rant. and there's a couple of other issues on this. Flats are going to be a separate episode. We've got to do some episodes on flat recycling. What we're talking about here is households and houses because it is much harder to get people to recycle in flats for lots of reasons. communal living, as in living lots of people in one building, does tend to make it harder for people to a know what they need to do, but also to take individual responsibility.

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James Piper: So houses typically recycle better than flats, they have better services, all those kind of things. So we're going to talk about that separately. Everything we're talking about here is about houses. In the UK, about 75% of councils collect general waste fortnightly. I have focused on England in the stats. I'm about to give because I could have gone into the Welsh and Scottish and Irish systems, but honestly, it's just really quite hard. So we're going to just use England as representative and we'll talk a little bit about Wales as well. So we've talked about this before, but just as a reminder, household waste in England, our recycling rates are about 43 to 45% depending on which year you're looking at. Rather sadly, they're actually dropping each year.

Robbie Staniforth: They've at least plateaued, haven't theyah I.

James Piper: Anything dropped, they sort of got close to 45% and then now down at like 43%. So again, tell all your family and friends about this podcast. Let's get those percentages up. But household waste re stamas typically in England are about 43 to 45% and about 49% of our wasted incinerated and the rest is landfill. So we get something between 5 and 10% going off to landfill. We talked a little bit about that on our incineration episode. That landfill is very expensive. It's more likely to go down the incineration route. Incineration is getting increasingly expensive with the emissions trading scheme. That will be a different episode. but what we're going to start seeing is recycling becoming the most economical route for our waste to go. So I would hope that 43 and 45% will increase. We're meant to be doing a legislation episode today. We're going to do that next week. As part of that, we're having some discussion about simpler recycling. But simpler recycling needs its own episode. the basics are, ah, that coun councils soon in 2026 I think. Robbie, is that right?

Robbie Staniforth: Yep, that's it.

James Piper: 2026 councils will have to collect food waste and they will have to collect cardboard, separate to aluminium, glass and plastic and steel. We talk about it separately. We're going toa have a big discussion about whether that's a good thing or not. But it's important to understand as we just go through some of these stats.

Robbie Staniforth: So in 2022, 2023 in England, 56.5% of the waste was residual. So it was just couldn't be recycled. Not going to go into. Because some of that probably could have been recycled but for whatever reason it went to either landfill or incineration. Around 20%. 26%, sorry, was recycling. So that's mostly packaging, but also newspapers and pamphlets and things like that. around 15.3% was organic waste. That's mostly garden. And, about 2.3% was separate food Waste that got collected.

James Piper: So how. I mean, food waste there is really low 2%. So I suspect this is telling us that a lot of councils, maybe most of them in England, mix their food waste and garden waste.

Robbie Staniforth: Yes. And it's organic waste. It's calledol. So there's some mixing of the two.

James Piper: And I did find that in some of my research that people were saying, put your food and garden waste together. So that's how we get that 43%. A combination of, our recycling bins, organic and separate food waste, that gives us 43%. Okay, great.

There are huge differences between local authorities across the UK in terms of recycling

so there's. We've got like, nine regions in the UK, like the Southwest, southeast, East Midlands, and within those regions are lots and lots of local authorities. And so I thought I'd look at the lowest in each region and the highest in each region, because I guess in theory they should kind of tally upright. It's the same sort of area. So, like, one of the areas is London. You would expect the London local authorities to be quite similar, but that is quite far from the truth. So if we talk, for example, about the lowest, so 17.7%, that is Tower Hamlets in London, that is the lowest at 17.7%. And the highest in London is Bromley at 48.7%. So they've got a difference of what, just over 30% between the lowest and the highest. Now, the reality is, in London, Tower Hamlets is quite flat, heavy, it's lots of flats. And so you're going to have that difficulty of, like, being amazing recycler. And you might have Bromley that has more houses and therefore it's a bit easier to recycle. So you're going to get big differences from that. But we'll come into some of the specifics in a second. Robbie, which one was the highest? Which one had the 61.6%?

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, that was South Oxfordshire. Sounds like a very leafy place to live to me, that. Lots of space for lots of different bins, I reckon.

James Piper: Yeah. And the lowest in the southeast, south Oxfordshire, was 61.6%. Dartford is 23.5%, which is the lowest in that area. I mean, that's like nearly a 40% difference between those two.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah.

James Piper: Wow.

Robbie Staniforth: In the same corner of the country, you can get such variations. People won't quite realise that it's such a big range. I mean, I knew there were differences, but these are bigger differences than I thought.

I looked at nine local authorities to see how often they collect general waste

James Piper: This is the bit I regret next, because we've got nine areas, we've got two councils in each, the lowest and the highest, I'm not going to go for all of them

00:30:00

James Piper: because it will take ages. And the. We're laughing because I did go through all the. Realised it was taking ages and it's now just been cut. If you're listening to this, there is. There will be three minutes of deleted footage of me just going to every single one. We realised it was awful content.

Robbie Staniforth: They're lucky because they didn't have to sit through you just reading through a list of local authorities, like I did.

James Piper: Yeah, that's right. I regret doing this next week because I went onto all of their websites to work out how often they collect their general waste, how often they collect recycling, whether they collect their recycling mixed and separated and whether they collect up food. So the summary. So there's nine of each now I'm going to be open Tower hamlets, which is 17.7%.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah.

James Piper: Their website didn't work. Oh, like I know why they're the lowest.

Robbie Staniforth: That says something.

James Piper: Their website just does not work. I was trying really hard to get all the recycling data and I couldn't. So Tower Hamlet, 70.7%. I have a sneaking suspicion that might be partly because there's lots of flats, partly because consumers can't actually find out what they can recycle and wear. And I did notice a bit of a theme that the best local authorities had apps and there was one, in fact, I'm trying to remember which one it was, where they would notify you. So East Riding had a very high riskting rate at 58.4% and they had an app that would notify me and say, it's time to put your bin out. And I was very impressed with that.

Robbie Staniforth: O, that's right up your alley.

James Piper: Sorry, I know we're being a bit. We're kind of going around the houses, literally, in different cities. We're going around the houses on this. But it's quite important to just understand the differences in different local authorities, with recycling. And so when I looked at the ones that's called the lowest. Let's talk about frequency of bins. When I looked at the ones that's called the lowest, four of them had their general waste collections weekly and four of them had it fortnightly. Okay. So in terms of frequency of Bing collection, general waste collection, four weekly, four fortnightly, in terms of the highest. So, the best performing local authorities, they had none that were collected weekly, none of the general waste collected weekly, seven were collected fortnightly and two of them were collected three weekly. Okay, now why would an infrequent general waste collection cause you to have a better recycling rate? Because if you have an infrequent general waste collection, as in not weekly, you start thinking, I'm not going to have enough space for this. I'm going to have to start recycling properly. I can't ignore it. And so when we talk about the lowest councils, the councils that are, in my view, underperforming for recycling, four of them collected their general collection weekly, four of them fortnightly. When we look at the best councils, seven were fortnightly and two or three weekly.

Robbie Staniforth: okay, so that's the direction of travel. If you want higher rates, we think that's a, correlation and a causality, don't we, rather than a coincidence.

James Piper: Yeah, I mean definitely the biggest correlation actually was in food waste. Because in the lowest performing councils, seven of eight. Now I know there's nine, but remember, Tower Hamlet's website didn't work, so it's eight. Seven of eight did not collect food waste in the lowest performing councils. Whereas when you flip it and you look at the highest performing, eight of the nine collected food waste and the only one that didn't actually was, County Durham in the northeast. And they had a recycling rate of 37.1%, which is astonishing that they are the best in the Northeast. That just says the whole of the Northeast has very low recycling rates because the lowest is 23.1%, which is Middlesbrough, and the highest is County D at 37.1%. So that's the smallest gap between best and worst. And that happens, I think, because of that food waste issue. So food is the biggest correlation. If you collect food waste, you are likely to be a better recyc or have a higher recycling rate as a local authority.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah. And for those people who are confused as to why the northeast has ah, such a, low rate when we just shouted out, East Riding of Yorkshire, it's because that is a separate one. So the way it's divided up, just to be clear, is East Midlands, there's an Eastern, there's London, there's the Northeast, which was that low performer. There's the Northwest, that's places like Liverpool, Southeast, which is separate to London, Southwest, which is where we are with Bristol, there's the West Midlands and importantly Yorkshire and Humber. So there is a spot in the northeast of the country that's doing very well, but they just don't get included with the likes of Middlesbrro, County Durham, etc.

James Piper: Maybe I should have read out all the, all the percent. Thank you, Robbinsy. I've got a side note on this. I have no idea why so many of the websites councils use grey or black bins for recycling and green for general. I just. What, what's going on? I've said this before. I think I said this on Radio 4 when I was on an hour was such a weird thing, isn't it? You would think green recycling, black general, sort

00:35:00

James Piper: of thematically the best way of doing it. And I know on this podcast we say put it in the black bin and people might be going, send that to the recycling.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, gosh.

James Piper: Okay, yeah, color'a big issue. We'll talk about that on a separate trash talk.

Extra in southwest Queensland doesn't collect food waste or glass or cartons

Colour of bins, because it's a, it's worth us delving into why those aren't uniform in each, in each local authority.

Robbie Staniforth: Gosh, you're teariing up a lot of content here.

James Piper: Stay tuned. I was surprised to, to see Extra actually as one of the lowest in the southwest, because Extra, I know very well, I went to university there is at, 24 and a five half percent and I looked into it and it's a partly they're doing quite a lot of things right in terms of frequency and all that kind of stuff and I know the guys that ex to council, they work really hard to get this right, but I noticed that they don't collect glass or cartons and this seems to be a bit of a theme. If they're collecting food waste, they're doing frequency secretly. Actually, the next one is making sure you're collecting glass and cartons. And I reached out to them to ask this question and they said, well, we do collect glass and cartons. We've got bottle banks for glass, and we've got banks for cartons as well. So, yeah, and Matt, who I reached out to, actually said food waste isn't completely collected all over the council. It's not, it's not fully in place yet. so that probably is one of the reasons, even though on their website it looked like they did collect food waste, it hadn't been fully rolled out. And also their Murf, I think, is being refurbished, revitalised in 2026 and it's quite old now. And again, age of MF would dictate how much recycling happens. And typically where you see a council not collect glass, it's because they've got an older MF that can't deal with the material. I really like Stratford Upon Avon. Stratford on Avon had gone with a 1, 2, 3. Recycling system, they called it 123.

Robbie Staniforth: Oh, that's catchy.

James Piper: Yeah. One was.

Robbie Staniforth: What does it mean, though?

James Piper: Well, one was, we're doing weekly food. We're doing that one a week. so weekly food, it was the one fortnightly recycling, which was the two, and three weekly general, which was the three. That's very co.

Robbie Staniforth: Cool. That's very catchy. Yeah.

James Piper: Also weekly food and three weekly general is brilliant. I would have preferred weekly recycling. B. I suspect 1, 113 didn't. Didn't get past the marketing team.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, I think I need recycling a little more often than every second week, personally, given the size of the little container that I've got.

James Piper: Yes. So takeay messages there. The general bin at the lowest end there was an equal mix between weekly and fortnightly collections. But at the highest end no one was collecting weekly, seven were collecting fortnightly and two were three weekly. But the main take home point is the food waste. 89% collected food in the best councils, but only 12 and a 5% collected it in the bad. So if I was in a council strategy meeting and they were saying, how are we going to increase recycling? I would be collecting food waste separately and I would be reducing the frequency that we collect general waste bins forces people to recycle and that's what we're talking about today, reducing that frequency of general bins.

Robbie Green: Wales is second best recycler in the world

So we need to head out of England, Robbie. Let's get across the bridge, which is very literal for us, because Bristol and Wales, you know what, half an hour between them.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, that's it. Yeah.

James Piper: Not far away and it is just across a bridge. And Wales, as we said in episode one, is the second best recycler in the world. And you managed to dig out some slides from. Was it. I think it was from June 2024.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, that's right, yeah. So what I wanted to do was I, thanks to my contacts at, RAP and Welsh Government Rap Cmry, who gave me some information about what the local authorities are doing when it comes to residual waste, because I wondered if they're the second best recycler in the world, does that have anything to do with how frequently or infrequently general waste collections are being made of the unrecyclable stuff? And across the 22 local authorities that there are in Wales, only 10 local authorities were collecting fortnightly and 10 were collecting every three weeks. So it's as common to be collecting fortnightly as it is three weekly from the Statistics I saw, none of them are collecting general waste Weekly. And there two of the final two local authorities of the 22 were collecting every four weeks. So it sort of does go to show that when you go to one of the best places in the world, they're just collecting the general waste less frequently, which forces people to engage with recycling services.

James Piper: Yeah, there was a really good example in there. So thank you to Emma at Rapp who provided this. And they looked at, Conwe local authority, who introduced three weekly collections and what they saw was food waste recycling increased by 20%, recycling overall increased by 10% and the residual was down 19%. And lots and lots of people talk about fly tipping here. They say, well, there'll be an increase in fly tipping because if you collect three weekly gives people less of an opportunity to put their bin out. If they go on holiday and they miss it, suddenly it's six weeks before they could put their bin out. What does that mean? It means there's going to be an increase in fly tipping. Well, they had a look at it and there was

00:40:00

James Piper: no increase in fly tipping over. When they moved to three weekly collections, there was no statistically significant increase in fly tipping. and so, really important, we're going to talk a little bit next week about example I have about waste carrier licences. So make sure you tune into next week so you can hear my story about waste carrier'license because the reality is most fly tipping will come from us not managing our waste correctly when we get someone to come and collect it. If we don't ask about waste carrier licences, it's more likely to get fly tipped.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah. And so I then had a look. We had that example from Wales and then we wondered, about anywhere in England that went to three weekly. And, someone had posted that Berry was the first local authority or English local authority to report on their year of, going to three weekly collections. So this isn't the four weekly that's been in the headlines for Bristol, but is obviously less frequent than the fortnightly and its household recycling rate in 2014, 2015, that year, that financial year was 39%. They introduced the three weekly collections. The first year, 2015 to 2016, when it was introduced, the recycling shot up to 49%. So the whole of the UK was plateauing at the time in terms of recycling rates. But they showed that changing this general waste collection really made a huge difference in jumping up the recycling rate.

James Piper: Let's talk about Bristol. Let's come back to Bristol and make some observations. They could be the first major city to go full weekly on general. So, remember, what we're talking about here is your black or green bin, depending on which local authority you're in, it's black for Bristol. This is our residual waste. If they move it to four weekly or three weekly, it will increase recycling. But people are angry. They don't want this, because if you go on holiday and you, as I said, you miss your bin, suddenly you've got your bin kicking around for six or eight weeks. It's just something that people are generally against. And there was a little petition put up saying, please don't do this. And as of last night, I noticed 8,498 people had signed it to say, please don't do this. And so we can imagine that most those people have filled in the consultation that Bristol Council are running and it'be interesting to see the results. So, in Bristol, we have a Green Party leading our council. so the Green Party in the UK is very environmentally focused, so they are looking at this quite seriously. And as I said, they're doing this consultation. I actually went and filled in the consultation last night just to have a look at the kind of.

Robbie Staniforth: Very good. I haven't filled mine in yet.

James Piper: Oh, I've done it just to, find out the kind of things they were talking about. So I'll just quickly pull out some highlights. They just had some really interesting things in there. So they mentioned that they have the highest recycling rate of the English core cities, but they want to improve that further. And I think Bristol is at about 45% for recycling, which for a core city is very, very good, you know, for how populated Bristol is, that's very good, but it can get a lot better. And three weekly bin collections, or four weekly bin collections are definitely the way to do it. Remember, we get our recycling and food waste collected weekly. So that's a really important context. You know, if, our recycling and food waste is collected weekly, in theory, it should be hard for us to fill that general bin over these kind of time periods, because we've got an opportunity to get rid of all of our packaging and food. They put up some interesting stats. They basically said if they went to 3 weekly, it would save 1.3 million and if they went to full weekly, it would save 2.3 million. So, I mean, not huge amounts of money in the grand scheme of things, but important at a time where councils are strapped for cash. And, they said in the consultation that 50% of households don't recycle food, which I just think is shocking. It's like the easiest thing to get rid of. I mean, I have friends who don't recycle food waste and there is literally nothing I can do. I go around their house, I try and help them show how easy it is, but I have friends who just will not do it.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, it's a weird behaviour change thing. but once you start collecting food, it then becomes very weird for you to see food waste mixed in with other unrecyclable waste. And actually quite disgusting to open your non food bin and see a mix of dust that's come out of your vacuum cleaner in with orange peels or whatever. It's strange how quickly you get normalised to the new habit. It's just taking that leap.

James Piper: Yeah. And as we observed earlier, recycling rates are starting to fall. And to maintain current recycling levels, the council estimated it would need to invest between 500,000 and a million pounds on education campaigns to curtail the drop in recycling.

Robbie says Bristol Council should move to three weekly collections rather than four

So from analysing the materials that were thrown in the general bin, what they found was a quarter of general bin waste is food waste that could be recycled. The food waste bin. A quarter.

00:45:00

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah.

James Piper: And the other quarter was paper, card, glass, plastic and cans and things that could be recycled. So what they're basically arguing is we offer a fortnight collection, but half of what you put in the bin could go in your recycling bin. So by moving it to four weekly, it should all be okay as long as you will recycle better. so there is a logic to that. And when Bristol Council changed from weekly to fortnightly connection for general bins, it'actually increased recycling by 14%. So there is definitely logic to this. look, we could talk for ages on this. I think the reality is, my feeling is the best thing to do when it comes to general waste is to move to three weekly collections, not four weekly. I think the four weekly collections is probably just too much for the average person to get through. That would mean them recycling everything. So recycling everything, every piece of packaging, every bit of food waste, I think it's probably too much and I just get the feeling that Bristol Council are probably putting out this kind of, we want to move to four weekly, getting a lot of press around it, to then meet in the middle and do a three weekly collection. What do you think, Robbie?

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, it feels like a three weekly collection is sensible. It's a big jump from fortnight le to every four weeks.

James Piper: And there was an interesting bit in the survey they called out Specifically nappies and talked about should we the invest in reusable nappy campaigns or nappy recycling and should we also start collecting up flexible plastic? And those two things, if they introduce those, could drastically help out much was in general. So if they wanted to move to full weekly, the way to do it is to have nappy recycling schemes and to also collect up, flexible plastic rubbish or knots.

Robbie answers your question about how to recycle old spectacles

So for rubbish or kn not, we're talking about spectacles or glasses. And we've been having a great discussion over our Discord. Just a little promo for our Discord and loads of people have contributed to this one. So thank you, to Kate, who asked the question about old glasses in her house, and to Ian and others, there's Ian the opportunist, all sorts of discord names, of people who have contributed to us. So thank you very much for helping us out.

Robbie Staniforth: And so in terms of how can we recycle old spectacles, there's charities who will take them and send them to countries that are in need. So there's not as many as they used to be. according to the Discord thread, which is a little bit frustrating, but it's much better if they are working spectacles that they get reused. and there's a great scheme by lions recycling.co.uk who will reuse those. And it's a sort of, a recycling scheme for glasses.

James Piper: Yeah. And they have collection points all over England. Diet. Actually, had a look and mine was like 0.1 miles from my house. It was like a Vision Express near my house that I could take all glasses back to. And they are donated to Lions Recycling. They send those pairs to places that they're most needed in the world, basically. And if they can't be reused, then they get recycled in the uk and the money that's made from the recycling, it goes back into the project. So really, really good. And we had people specifically saying, look, when you do the podcast, can you make sure people share it? Because not enough people know about these guys and there's a real opportunity for us to spread the word. So share the podcast. That's great.

Robbie Staniforth: Absolutely, yeah. And for those people in Bristol, I found out it couldn't be simpler because you can put these in your black box to be recycled at the curbside. But I got found out by my partner who saw that I had put a broken pair of sunglasses into our general waste bin. Shameful, shocking behaviour from someone who should be leading on recycling. I was just in a rush and Without a second thought. It just goes to show, she found them in there and said, these can be recycled. Just put them in the recycling bin. So slap on the wrist for me. I'm not perfect.

James Piper: Tune in next week for more Robbie's Confessions. Rubbish question.

How clean do cans, plastic, glass need to be before recycling bids

Now, I've. Here's my confession. I feel really bad about thisus. Rachel emailed me a long time ago and then I sort of put it in my notes, but we haven't got around to it yet. And then Rachel was desperate, she messaged me on Insta saying, please can you sort this one out? Because I need the answer to this question. It's causing arguments in my house, like, I need the answer. So the question is, how clean do cans, plastic, glass need to be before putting into household recycling bids? So for cans and bottles, contamination is going to burn off in the recycling process, so we don't need to worry too much about it. But what we have to remember is people who are hand sorting this or treating this at waste plants want a nice environment to work in. So I guess whenever we're putting anything in our recycling bin, yeah, we could argue, oh, it's going to get burnt off, but we should also be thinking, well, would I like to be handling this at the other end? So it's always good to get your recycling as clean as possible. So cans, bottles going to get burnt off in the process, but keep it clean as possible for things like plastic trays

00:50:00

and card and paper, anything that's going to, that's baked on is going to reduce what can be sent out the other end, what's going to get through the recycling process. And if there's lots and lots of contamination, what you have to remember is these guys are washing the material when it gets to them and if they're washing something in water and it's really dirty, that water is going to, to m. Need to be changed more often. And so again, it's just nicer environment for people. If we keep, our recycling clean, it increases the life of the wash water that they're using. And really we just need to make sure that things are as clean as possible so that the yield that comes out is as good as it possibly can be. And often we talk about like 3D and 2D. So if you're out and about eating off a tray and there's some 3D left on it, so like bits of food, just scrape those off. Anything 2D, a bit of staining isn't going to be the end of the world. But things that are baked on and things that are 3D are definitely worth just scraping off. It's definitely the best thing to do.

Robbie Staniforth: Yeah, no, agreed. And you don't want to use extra water so a great way to do this is to be using the wash water at the end of washing the dishes just quickly give your recycling a rinse, in the last of that water rather than pouring out a special bowl.

James Piper: O thank you so much Robbbyie. We had a lot to cover there today.

Robbie Staniforth: Whoa. Yeah, that was good.

James Piper: Oh, good. I'm glad you enjoy it.

Robbie Staniforth: I really enjoyed it.

James Piper: Thank you everyone for listening. As always, if you want to email us with talkin rubbishpodcastmail.coma you can get us on socials rubbishpodcast or go over to our Discord where you can communicate with with all of our, keen and green recyclers who have joined that community. Our link for that is in our show notes and as always we will see you next week. Bye.

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