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We can’t just keep throwing everything to land-fill sites.
Historically we just threw everything into the black wheelie
bin which just went to land-fill.
Land-fills are filling up at an
alarming rate; we don’t have room for more land-fill sites do we need
to try and think about what else we can do with this waste.
At Belfast City Council we
have given house holders a lot of capacity for different types of
materials that can be collected and recycled instead of being sent to
landfill sites. The blue bin is collected every two weeks and it can
take a wide variety of materials for recycling. So all your papers
for example: your magazines your newspapers, telephone directories
that sort of paper is all fine. The blue bin is also for plastic bottles
so anything that’s plastic and has a screw top for example: Your drinks
bottles, shampoo bottles, your washing up liquid bottles all those
sorts of things are fine in terms of plastic bottles. Also cans, food
and drink cans, so obviously soup tins, beans tins as well as the
drinks tins. Along with the tins you can also put in biscuit tins and
aerosol cans as well, which I don’t think a lot of people realise. So
altogether in the blue bin you have your paper, cardboard, cans and
plastic bottles, which takes an awful lot of waste out of the black
bin. It’s a huge proportion of what an average household would throw
away.
Recycling is so easy and straightforward. Just put all your
recycling waste into the blue bin and your food waste into your brown
bin - just keep it under the sink. People say does it leave a smell or
make a mess? But it doesn’t.
A plastic bottle can go in, give it a rinse,
squeeze it down and put the lid back on and that just keeps it
nice and small in your bin and caps can be recycled as long as they are
attached to the bottle they are fine. Things like yogurt pots,
butter tubs that sort of
thing, we can’t accept just at the moment as it’s a different blend of
plastics. Beverage cartons quite often have more than one material in
them so they seem to be made of cardboard but they have a plastic
opening. They sometimes have a lining on the inside, sometimes
aluminium, sometimes its wax so it keeps it waterproof so because there
are all these different materials it makes it more difficult to separate
for recycling. We collect them altogether at the recycling centre.
The brown bin is mostly for garden waste and food
waste so all your organic material from the garden can go into the
brown bin and we recently introduced food waste into the brown bin so all
your food waste – meat, fish, bones, dairy, cheese, any leftovers from
your dinner can all go into your kitchen caddy. The council provides
biodegradable bags for the caddy. You just put it all in there, tie
up the bag and pop it into your brown bin and all that goes away
with your garden waste to be composted. We have very strict
landfill diversion targets from Europe, as do all the member states
of Europe so we have to divert as much of this waste from landfill
which really means to take it out of the black bin and recycle it in as
many different ways as we can so we have less going to landfill. If we
don’t meet these targets, the council will be fined huge amounts
of money and we really want to avoid having to pass this onto the
ratepayer of Belfast so this is why we are giving everyone as much
opportunity to recycle as possible. We are trying to make it as easy as
possible. We have our recycling centres as well as the kerb side
bins for people to recycle as much as they can.
Subtitles: UTV