My Experience of Tameside #BinSwap
It may shock a number of people to learn that when Tameside Council rolled out Bin Swap in September (although I full agreed with the environmental and financial implications) I was some what nervous.
My partner and I both work from home, we have 3 cats, and whilst we have no children - we do create a lot of waste. Like many we would always fill the black/grey bin, we would usually fill our blue bin (paper), half fill the green bin (glass) and regularly filled the brown bin (garden & food).
The week of BinSwap rolled around and we filled the green bin. I thought “Damn, what do I do now” ... the answer was to recycle everything I could & anything left would have to wait.
One evening that week Sarah and I discovered a tip to recycling more, and it not only worked but seriously helped to change our mindset. We were the “black bin will do” and are now “recycling everything” people. What we discovered was these three colour-coded kitchen bins (you can get 4 but we have a brown caddie).
Having these in the kitchen made the whole problem of recycling immediately less of a handful. Just as with putting potato peelings in the brown food caddie whilst cooking, we could now tear up boxes for the blue bin, putting plastics lids and foil in the red (for the black bin) and anything else really in the green bin.
What was the result of these 3 bins that cost £26?
The green bin is half full (at most!) for the past 2 green bin collections.
We completely fill the black bin with plastics, we suspect this was what we filled the old general bin with.
We now have another blue bin for paper and cardboard, our work means that we do generate a lot of paper waste.
And our Brown bin continues to be used as it ever has.
This isn’t a case study, but you can read case studies from other families on the tameside council recycling website.