What's in your bins?

As the title says, What's in your bins? Have you looked lately or don't you care ? Nothing wrong with just dumping stuff in the bins including the recycling bins but as this blog has a bit of a green eco bent then I feel that we all have a duty of care to look in our bins and see what we can avoid putting in there in the future.

Take for instance an Innocent plastic bottle full of lovely cool mineral water.

When you have downed the mineral water and (hopefully) put the bottle in the recycling bin then is that it for you or do you wonder where that plastic bottle goes and what happens to it ? I did so I phoned a few council departments and the general consensus is that it is shipped off to china or India s we don't have the facilities to recycle plastic that much in Britain. Apparently the bottle is sent half way round the world in bulk containers on ships and then chipped up or pelleted and then sent back to us in this form to be reused in making more bottles etc.

Now if you didn't buy that bottle in the first place you wouldn't need to be part of the pollution caused by this shipping pollution would you? You would be able to say that you are treading lighter on the fragile earth and if you think of it it's only one bottle but if you buy one a day it's 18.25 tonnes of plastic a year......

Also when you are shopping why do we need to put fruit and veg in plastic bags? We pick the produce from the shelves, we put them in bags and then put the bags in the trolley. When we get to the checkout we put the bags on the conveyor belt. Is it so hard not to use the bag in the first place? Try it next time and see if you REALLY do need the plastic bag.

Again this sort of packaging makes up about 60% of our household rubbish that goes to landfill according to Friends of the Earth.