Recycling
Bassetlaw District Council run an alternate week
kerbside collection of dry recyclables. This means that one
week your green wheeled bin containing your residual waste will be
collected and then the following week your blue wheeled bin
containing the dry recyclable materials will be collected.
Below are some Frequently Asked Questions
regarding the Twin Bin Scheme, which we hope will be of use to you
when deciding what can and cannot be put into the blue bin, and the
reasons as to why Bassetlaw District Council run such a scheme.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What Christmas/Seasonal items cannot be put in my
Blue Recycling Bin?
Please do not put in items such as polystrene packaging, plastic
toys, plastic tie wraps that hold the toys in their box, food
wrappings, wood, glass, christmas trees , Foil Wrapping paper, or
the Foil type Christmas cards, ribbon or string.
Can I recycle my real Christmas Tree?
If your real christmas tree cannot be replanted you can take it
to the Household Waste Recycling Centre at either Shireoaks
Road in Worksop or the Hallcroft site in Retford.
Full details relating to the recycling of your real tree
will be put on in the New Year.
What materials can I put into my Blue
Recycling Bin?
The blue recycling bin is for paper, magazines,
catalogues, directories junk mail, envelopes cards and cardboard,
clean and dry plastic bottles, clean and dry yoghurt pots, clean
and dry margarine tubs, clean and dry food and drinks cans.
Please ensure that junk mail is removed from the
envelopes and any plastic envelopes disposed of in the green bin.
Please remove tops from plastic bottles and dispose of them
in the green bin. Remember IF IN DOUBT LEAVE IT
OUT or telephone 01909 533156 to confirm
which bin an item should be put into. Blue Bin Leaflet.
Do we put all the materials in the bin
together?
Yes we collect what is called co-mingled
material. Whilst we appreciate members of the public wishing to
sort the waste into different materials, this is not required in
the blue bin. The material is easier to sort if it is all
mixed together as there are no bags/boxes to open.
What about wrapping paper and packaging
from around toys etc, can these be recycled?
If the wrapping is paper (not the foil wrapping
paper), this can go into your blue bin. We would ask that the
sellotape be removed if possible and remove all
ribbons and or bows before putting the wrapping paper into the blue
bin. Cardboard packaging from around toys is acceptable but
please ensure that any ties that are used within the packaging to
keep the toy secure are removed and put into the green bin.
Do not place any plastic wrapping or moulded plastic covers
(eg the plastic that covers easter eggs) into the blue bin.
Why don’t you collect glass in the blue
bin?
Currently all the materials collected within the
blue bin are collected within a compaction vehicle in order to
allow as much material to be collected in one go without having to
make extra vehicle journeys and therefore cause more pollution and
damage to the environment. As a lot of the material is sorted
by hand it would not be safe to collect glass and ask people to
sort recyclables that contain shards of broken glass. As well
as the health and safety aspect, the paper mills do not want to
take paper that has been in close proximity to glass as any shards
of glass, cause major problems as the paper mills.
If you don’t collect glass from the
kerbside, where can I dispose of it?
Bassetlaw District Council have approximately 70
bring sites around the district that can take glass. We would
ask you, that instead of throwing glass bottles and jars into your
green residual bin, take them to the nearest glass bring site.
Your nearest glass bring site can be found by going to
Recycle More and typing in
your Postcode and this will give you a list of all your local
recycling sites.
I have been told that the material that
goes into the blue bin goes to landfill anyway – is this
true?
No it certainly is not true. The Refuse Men
collect the dry recyclable material from over 48,000 households
over a 2 week period. All this material is taken into a Waste
Transfer Station in the District and them moved on to a MRF
(Materials Reclamation Facility or Sorting Station) where the
materials are sorted. The County Council are responsible for
the disposal of the recyclable material and as there are Government
Targets set for the amount of waste Local Authorities recycle,
there has to be an audit trail to prove where the material
goes.
Is this material sorted within
Nottinghamshire?
At the moment no, the material is taken to a MRF
in the south and dealt with there. However County have just
signed a new 25 year Waste Contract with Veolia and it is in part
of the contract that a MRF will be built in Nottinghamshire within
the next 4 years, and then all Nottinghamshire recyclable waste
will be sorted within the Nottinghamshire boundary.
You say that the blue bin waste does not
go to landfill – why then have I seen both green and blue bins
emptied into the same dustbin lorry?
Occasionally this does happen. If for
instance there is a freighter breakdown, in order for us to get
through the rounds and empty all the bins, it may be necessary for
us to pull in a vehicle that has been collecting Green Bin Waste to
help finish the days work. This only happens if there is no
other way that we can complete the days schedule. Another
occasion that a Green and Blue bin may be emptied into the lorry is
if a bin has been contaminated with the wrong materials and the
householder has moved house. It would be unfair to ask a new
resident to sort out somebody elses waste, so in this instance, we
would empty the blue bin into a residual waste lorry. Again
this is the exception rather than the rule as normally if a bin is
contaminated we advise the householder that it is there
responsibility to remove the wrong items and then we will empty the
bin, if it contains the correct materials, on the next blue bin
collection day.
Why do you ask for all the bottles and
cans to be clean and dry?
We ask for the materials to be clean and dry for
3 main reasons. Firstly a lot of the material collected is
hand sorted and it is not very nice for anybody to have to sort
material that is not clean and may be covered in food waste etc.
Secondly if the materials are not clean and the items are put
loose into the bin it is possible that they could attract flies.
Another consideration is that the reprocesses want clean
material, not material that is wet and contaminated with food waste
as this renders the material unsuitable for recycling. All we
ask is that when you are washing up, food tins and cans and plastic
bottles etc are rinsed out before letting the washing up water out
of the sink.
Why can’t you collect our Green residual
bins every week like you used to?
The Government is committed to making a big
change in the way that we collect waste to bring the UK more in
line with the recycling practices that happen elsewhere in Europe.
As a result all Local Authorities have been set targets for
recycling.
In order to achieve these levels of recycling,
changes had to be made to waste collection services. If we
continued to empty green residual bins each week, people would not
recycle to capacity and would continue as they had always done by
putting everything into the green bin. By emptying the green
bin on alternate weeks along with a recycling bin, people are
sorting their waste into materials that can be recycled and
materials that we are not able to recycle to allow space in their
green residual bins for the materials that are not at the moment
recyclable.
As well as this reason, in Bassetlaw we looked
for a scheme that would not put an extra cost burden onto the
Council Tax Payer and by collecting on alternate weeks it has
allowed us to put into place a kerbside recycling collection at a
minimal cost to the Council Tax Payer.
During the summer months we had problems
with maggots in our Green Bin. What can we do to stop this
happening again?
Maggots are the larvae stage of the common
housefly. Flies are attracted to food and other rubbish, they
lay their eggs on the rubbish and these then hatch into maggots.
The maggots then form pupae and eventually hatch into flies.
The whole of this process can take up to 10 days in warm
weather and up to a month in the cold weather. Please see
separate section under Refuse Collection with tips on how to avoid
maggots and flies during the summer months.
Last Updated - 05/02/2010