Do You Recycle?

YOu know, if there was an actual policy of recyclig at my work, I'd have a tidier desk.

That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

It's also true.

I am somewhere between the first and second option. I take most useful junk down to the charity shop but I have no way of composting or dealing with some waste and I have to restrain myself from accumulating junk so I don't look at freecycle.

xp - Ha! My post starts almost exactly the same as Ed's...

I am between the first and second option. Our council takes paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, tins, glass. We pay £20 a year (on top of the council tax) for a garden/kitchen waste collection. You have to pay a tenner for them to collect big items such as old sofas. The local recycling place is very comprehensive, pretty much everything is recycled, including now big plastic items which I always assumed were pretty un-recyclable.

We have the fortnightly collection system whereby the recycleable stuff is collected one week and the rubbish rubbish is collected the next (along with the garden rubbish in a separate wheelie bin).

I just checked and now the council will now collect up to 3 bulky items for free. Then it's £15 an item. Which is good as we have a knackered old bath that needs to go.

I'm sure there's something you can bury in your garden which you can put cooked food in but I can't find any info about it. Any ideas anyone?

I'm pretty solidly the second option, and feel bad that I'm not doing more. Especially at work.

One of my many petty complaints against the annoying neighbours - since they started dumping their trash in my bin, I've noticed that they don't recycle ANYTHING. There's tins and glass jars just sitting in the trash. That just provoked such a reaction of disgust in me.

But then I realised that we have no way of recycling anything but paper at work. I bought a soda in a tin the other day and suddenly realised that the only way to recycle it would be to take it home! That annoyed me/provoked guilt.

The recycling from home thing is good, though - apart from their weird insistence on not taking any plastic except drinks bottles. It all goes in big orange bags, which are collected at the same time as the trash. Doesn't even have to be sorted. I can't understand how anyone could *not* recycle given how easy they make it.

I voted for the second option but actually I may be somewhere between options 1 & 2.

Outside my block of flats there are recylcing bins for the three colours of glass that aren't blue* and paper, which I use. There is at present no recycling facility for plastic, but there is at work, so I take all my plastic there.

There are also facilties at work for toner catridges and batteries which I will use should the need arise.

* why aren't there recycling facilities for blue glass? Is it coz it is rare cf the other three colours? Is it un-recyclable? or do ppl assume that it looks so nice that ppl will want to keep their blue glass bottles and use them as ornaments (which is what seems to be happening in my girlfriend's garden?)

I can't understand how anyone could *not* recycle given how easy they make it.

The recycling bins on our estate are about 5 metres from the regular bins. Every week there are large cardboard boxes in the regular bins, or stacked up next to them. Laziness? Ignorance? Stupid selfish lazy ignorance?

Even with our slightly complex system (red bag for cardboard/paper , green bag for tins/plastic bottles, green box for glass, brown wheelie for garden) it only takes me about 5 minutes a day to recycle and yet you should have heard the moaning when they started it. The fortnightly collection forces you think about what you're putting in your rubbish bin. A couple of weeks ago in the local rag there was a couple who are gonna pay another hundred pounds+ to get a private contractor to take away their rubbish because the recycling was just too difficult!

best recycling ever - give it up for my mother's local authority, the London Borough of Enfield. Weekly collections of paper, glass, plastic (in a black plastic box) and organic material from garden *and* the kitchen (veg only: I'd imagine they don't take meat coz it spreads disease and attracts vermin) in a green one. And the bins have handles for ease of carrying and hinged lids which don't let the rain in and can't be stolen. They should get an award.

The annoying thing about the recycling bins is that they're normally locked so you can only post stuff through a large slot, which is a pain if you have a large binbag full of stuff. But lots of theses boxes are too big to go in the normal bins anyway, and given that it would take literally zero extra effort to stack them next to the recycling bins, I can only conclude that these people have no idea of the need for, or even the concept of, recycling.

Allegedly around 30% of people wouldn't recycle even if it meant the end of the planet, human race, life as we know it</dodgy statistic>

My council doesn't offer curbside recycling collection for anyone who lives in a block of flats. Which sort of defeats the point, since a block of 25 flats is going to create a bit more waste than a one-family home. So every week I troop down to some big wheelie bins down the road. It's not too bad but I doubt many people do that cause it is a hassle TBH.

I actually heard someone at the recycling place, moaning about having to put his wood in a separate skip say "We never had to do this before Blair got in". I almost said "look just leave it in a pile and I'll do it! I like throwing stuff in big skips...it make nice clanky noise."

I love taking big stuff to the islington dumping place (not my borough but it is more fun), you drive up into the big steel spaceship park up under the orange glow and the get to toss things from a great height into huge steel skips and make booming noises which echo around the concrete cave.

one thing which reduces the amount of recycling that can be done, and it's not easily solved, is rubbish that is a composite of more than one material. For example, envelopes.

Even if you ripped out the window of every window envelope and put it in the plastic recylcing, you still can't put yr envelopes in the paper recycling coz of the glue that holds them together, shut and holds the plastic window in place. Now thanks to my mail (half wanted, half junk mail) I would say that envelopes make up at least 50% of the paper I get. What's the solution? Can they make the gum of a different material? Or make envelopes like the little paper sachets that green tea teabags from the Chinese supermarket come in with interlocking holes and strips and no glue at all (I suspect the latter is impractical coz they come apart too easily, but hey).

xp Ned you so *should* have said that!

Another example is those juice cartons with a plastic spigot fastened onto the top. Totally, 100% unrecyclable. And the plastic spigot = totally, 100% unneccessary.

It all goes in big orange bags, which are collected at the same time as the trash. Doesn't even have to be sorted.

Oh, I wish. Rounds ours any deviation from their policy (which isn't published anywhere) results in them not picking up any of your recycling and putting a sticker on your recycling box telling you they didn't collect it because you didn't comply with the policy.

Some highlights we have managed to work out:

All items must be actually in the box, irrespective of size. If it's propped up next to it, hard lines.
Cardboard is only taken as long as it is just cardboard and doesn't have any labels, sticky tape etc anywhere on it.
Pizza boxes are out, even if they don't have plastic windows.
Paper should be in a bag, in the box, which they leave behind to blow about the street. Loose paper won't be collected.
Bottles, jars, cans are to be spotless and have all labels removed. Ideally you should put them through the dishwasher before you put them out. Glass with any damage at all won't be accepted.
They're supposed to take clothes and things for rags, but they always assume a bag with them in is rubbish, even if it has a label taped to it which says 'clothes' or 'rags'.

I'm sure there's more.

Anyway, I'm between 1 and 2. Council (hypothetically) takes paper, cardboard, cans, glass, clothing, batteries, shoes, foil. Like Ed, I take stuff down the charity shop.

I'm somewhere between 1 and 2 as well. Will get all composty and that when we move to our new house with its lovely big garden. Furniture will be given to charity or thrown in skips. Old clothes are going to charity/recycling places later today! My mum is champion skip-diver and has refurnished the whole of my parents' rented flat in Spain with stuff found lying around in/beside skips.

I like throwing stuff in big skips...it make nice clanky noise

Best clanky noise ever = going to the recycling depot and launching our old washing machine into a skip. CLANK!

xpost Holy shit. I just shove everything in the bin - envelopes, pizza boxes, skanky unwashed jars and bottles, and figure they'll sort it all at the other end. I wonder how much of it they're just chucking?

We make compost. It's kinda fun.

juice cartons (tetrapacks) tend to be laminates anyway and unrecyclable with or without spigots.

i am an option two here. i would be an option 1 but i never throw anything away that freecyclist would want (see boring computer question yesterday 8)

I wonder if anyone who doesn't recycle will actually pop up on this thread and explain why they don't. I'm imagining they're too afraid of being shouted at by hippies. Hah.

I don't know, is it a psychological thing? Like, the unwillingness to touch their own garbage? Because yes, you have to wash it out and put it in a different bag, but how is that really different from washing the dishes? Or is it just the idea of garbage somehow being unclean?

Or, worse yet, the idea that it's something that hippies and left wing commie bastard freaks want you to do, and therefore inherently suspicious? (you know, like, any contemplation of or action on global warming.)

I wonder about the need for washing stuff out, I kind of imagine everything gets industrially scoured at the other end anwyay.

I wash it out because I don't want old beer to dribble down my hand as am posting through the slot.

I wash things out out of consideration for the ppl who have to walk past it and smell it (ergo I don't bother with shampoo and washing up liquid bottles)

I just figure washing stuff makes it less grody for the people that come and pick it up. They seem to sort it by hand.

Number 1 for me. All food waste goes in the worm bin, all garden waste goes up the allotment. We try and use recycled wood for DIY jobs. Most kids clothes come from the charity shop and all our old stuff either goes back there or on eBay. Have started a recycling scheme at work and collect everyone's tins, bottles and batteries. Just about to get everyone recycling their compostables too.

Washing stuff out is good from a hygiene POV, but does decrease the energy efficiency of recycling.

Vegetable peelings etc either get eaten by the kids' guinea pigs or my chickens, or they go on the compost heap.

The compost heap gets all sorts of other stuff too, including the contents of the vacuum cleaner, grass and hedge clippings and shredded up bits of cardboard etc. They all rot down into really good compost.

Most cooked food scraps are wolfed down by the dog. He's like a canine waste disposal unit.

Newspapers are recycled in various ways - some are shredded and mixed in with other pet bedding (and then composted afterwards), some get used as weed-suppressant mulch in the garden, some are shredded/soaked/pressed into "logs" for the wood burner. It's a messy job, but I quite like doing it. I also made myself a deckle and frame, and am experimenting with turning soaked mulch into handmade paper.

Bits of tree are shredded and the wood chippings used to mulch my rose garden.

Glass jars with screw topped lids are always useful and normally end up in either my craft room filled with beads or embellishments, or in the garage with nails and screws in them. The kids always need them refilled with sweets or cookies for the bottle stall at the school christmas and summer fetes too. Or Mr Unruly decants foul smelling chemicals into them as part of his recently-acquired knife making and leather-working hobbies.

I smash up coloured glass bottles, tumble the fragments smooth in my pebble polishing machine, and use them as pretty mulch on top of large flower tubs. Remaining glass gets taken to the recycling point once a week or so.

I don't use much in the way of tinned food, but any empty cans are washed out and used by Mr C J in his workshop as paint or varnish tins, then eventually taken to the recycling point.

Children's clothes do a circuit around all my friends who have kids of varying ages - we always swap amongst ourselves as soon as anything has been outgrown. Anything left over gets taken to the charity shop, and anything too worn out gets stripped of the useful bits like zips and buttons, and the material is either used as rags for cleaning Mr C J's motorbike or the windows or can sometimes be used to stuff beanbag type bedding for the dog.

I hardly have any domestic waste to throw out at all - I can easily go three weeks without needing to put the dustbin out for collection.

haha koogs :( non-spigoted milk/juice cartons i have gleefully thrown in the recycling for years, naively imagining they'd be plowed back into the future carton supply

i just checked and things are looking up (used to be once place in scotland that did them)

http://www.tetrapakrecycling.co.uk/04.htm#map

lots of gotchas and exemptions to this stuff, no wonder people can't be bothered (and people trying and getting it wrong (polystyrene and yoghurt pots in the orange sacks) annoy me more than people who don't bother).

at work there are two recycling bins but i'm told that they just get emptied into the general rubbish by the cleaner because there's nowhere to put them outside.

That Tetrapak recycling scheme is terrible for the southeast, there's like 5% coverage or something and half of that is iffy.

what's super-ridiculous in Hackney is that the only plastic they recycle is plastic BOTTLES. ???? but plastic bottles could be ANY kind of plastic, or indeed multiple kinds in one package! (i.e. squeezy ketchup bottles, which have something like 6 different kinds of plastic in them.) how does Hackney's "only plastic bottles" policy make any kind of practical sense?

innocent drinks website gives an address in somerset for everyone to send their tetrapacks too. which is kinda missing the point, i think but then i hate innocent drinks and their smug ways (even though 'innocent towers'* is 5 minutes from my house)

(* just an anonymous unit on a trading estate in hammersmith)

plastic is usually typed on the bottom, lowest number = easiest. drinks bottles are usually type 1 (pet). milk cartons (and some supermarket carriers) usually type 2 (hdpe). herts council used to handle 1 2 and 3 quite happily but i err on the side of caution here and only recycle 1 and 2 (which is the majority of my waste anyway)

but koogs that makes SENSE (and it's what's done in the US - dumps and pickups are explicit about what they do and don't accept) but in Hackney it's just "plastic bottles only!" - i mean i'm sorry, there are plenty of other plastic products made out of exactly the same crap, and they even have the little numbers on the bottom too

It's only plastic bottles here too. But what's more mysterious is why do my neighbours wash their bottles out, then put them out with the tops screwed back on - do they think that Coca-Cola just refill them?

In here you can recycle paper, cardboard, beverage cartons, glass, bottles, cans, metal, and biowaste through official means, so I do that. I also avoid buying needless crap and throwing things out if you can still use them.

See, if Lambeth actually said "type 1 or type 2" I would be fine. But they say "drinks bottles" so they get milk plastic, soda bottles, juice bottles, soup bottles that have a triangle on them, etc.

Since they need to sort it anyway, I'd rather err on the side of giving them too much rather than not enough.

am experimenting with turning soaked mulch into handmade paper.

great! and I expect the homemade paper is wrinkly and old looking and ideal for X mark the spot pirate treasure maps, arrrr!

Option number 2 for me :

Local council takes : paper/glass/food/aluminium/clothes weekly. They have public bins for cardboard. Some of the food waste could go on the compost, I guess, but I can rarely be arsed to separate it out. Mrs. Dr. C is more diligent about that. Occasionally there's a glass container that isn't useful to keep and is also a bit tricky to clean. I have to confess that I generally try to sneak these into the dustbin, although I get a bit of a ticking off if caught. For example, there was an incident earlier this week with a maple syrup bottle that I had sneaked into the bottom of the kitchen bin! I realise that I will get no sympathy here for this awful behaviour.

Green waste goes on the compost heap, but we have too much garden waste to deal with at the moment, so have ordered a HUGE green-waste bin that will be emptied fortnightly. It was ordered 8 weeks ago, however, and still hasn't turned up. The council managed to take the money instantly though. That reminds me that I need to phone them...

Thanks for the tetrapak tip, I see there's a collection point in the next borough to us and as I go there often I might start putting them in a bag. Also this made me smile...
http://www.tetrapakrecycling.co.uk/images/baglady.jpg

CJ, thinking about your routines, in which everything is neatly summed-up and unwasted, is v satisfying. THAT is an efficient household with someone(s) practical running it! I aspire to my own.

i'd like to think i'm option 1 but realistically i must be somewhere between 1 and 2. i hate throwing *anything* away. hackney is pretty hot for recycling (yes except for the "bottles only" mentalism - my friend l used to be in charge of hackney's recycling scheme and i think i made him splain this to me once but i have forgotten what he said) but yeah, as has already been said, SO many people just chuck everything in the rubbish... i do not understand. how is it more hassle to put it in a box next to a bin rather than in the bin? plus your bin gets full less often. grr.

We recycle plastic, cans, paper/cardboard and glass at the curb with the garbage.

I also keep glass jars for other uses and the dogs get most of the scraps. Wood/branches are chipped for mulch. When we have lots of big cardboard we take it the hippie recycling station downtown. Also, old clothes and books go to charity.

And I am a pack rat. I keep styrofoam and stuff from packaging for "crafts" (which means they're all piled up in my sewing room waiting for me to find a use for them.)

the hippie recycling station

So that's what happens to them.

The recycling programs in Chicago are horrible. Shameful for a a large city. So I do not recycle. To do so, I'd have to rent a car to drop off at recycling center. That is just not possible.

Also kind of defeats the purpose.

I think that ppl who throw everything in the rubbish will only be changed by carrots and/or sticks and at the moment there doesn't seem to be much of either.

I've only recently moved somewhere with recycling and haven't got round to doing it yet, mainly because the recycling boxes are full of yuck and there's plenty of other things that need doing around the place before I clean those out.

I'm also a bit skeptical about the point of it. I read somewhere the recycling process has a big carbon footprint and therefore is actually worse for the environment than just chucking everything in a big hole, but I forget where the article was so could be right-wing bias or something.

Everywhere I've lived (small-ish rural towns) save Boise had NO recycling program in place. There's a big dumpster somewhere in town that takes cans, and another for newspaper, and another for glass. And I don't have a car or the ability to take all my cans/beer bottles over there.

So, I use the newspaper to line the guinea pigs' cages, and I buy 2-liter soda bottles which make less rubbish, and I drink booze instead of beer for the lower number of bottles (mainly because having all those empties around screams ALCOHOLIC LIVES HERE). But I can't recycle really at all w/my current situation. So I actually voted for 3rd to bottom option: will I be alone?

Yeah, you'll be alone.

I'm not driving FWIW. But I am drinking. Yay!

Alone?

I'm between 1 and 2 as well. The council doesn't collect glass, so I have to take that elsewhere. I reuse small bags for sandwiches or freezing single portions of meat/fish and carrier bags for my rubbidge. I write lists on the backs of envelopes and cut up old clothes to use as dusters. Stuff I don't want that can be sold goes to the charity shop and I want to cry when I see my neighbours leave perfectly good furniture out for bulk collection (the council collect for free every Wednesday) rather than send it to a charity.

Freecycle is really fucking annoying. I joined and in two seconds my inbox was swamped, but there's no point in signing up for the digest because by the time you receive it, everything good has gone. So I unsubbed again.

Thing is, most of you people who are saying "ooh, between 1 and 2" are actually 1. I mean, I didn't mean for option 1 to be some crazy freegan The Good Life hippies, it just means people who do go out of their way above and beyond what the standard council offers. If you're dithering, you're probably option 1. The way I see it.

I once cleaned house for a crazy woman who was upset when I haphazardly rinsed some jars and bottles that I'd washed out for recycling, so they had some dish-soap bubbles on them. She had me take them out of the bin and re-rinse them.

This same woman once telephoned me in the evening to tell me that I'd left a dusting rag draped over the back of a kitchen chair.

At my parents' place in France, they can recycle all plastic except for carrier bags, which the leaflet says is not possible. Except my local Tesco has a big carrier bag recycling bin. Oh well, I don't need to use it because I take my shopping home in a crate. Much easier to carry.

xp I hope you poisoned her with Miracle-Gro.

She actually dropped dead at her computer several years ago. I had nothing to do with it. By then I no longer worked for her.

I guess the antidote finally wore off.

in sydney, a few years ago, they got real strict with the recycling to the point where garbage inspectors would be going through your trash at 5am making sure nothing recyclable was in the red bin and nothing unrecyclable was in the yellow bin and nothing but biodegradable waste was in the green bin. one time we screwed up somehow (even though we were all for recycling) so the city stopped picking up our trash until we wrote them a letter of apology.

now here in the united states, where noone seems to care whether you recycle or not, the recycle guy drops and leaves a bunch of our paper/plastic/aluminum on the street every week, which makes me want to not recycle because im sick of cleaning up after him. now I want a letter of apology from the city.

There's a pretty horrifying news clip on Yahoo right now about bottle water. I couldn't paste the link.

bottled

I keep the same water bottles going all summer. They get filthy. I'm probably ingesting all sorts of healthy soil organisms and backwash bacteria.

My boss at the nursery buys cases of 10 oz spring water and unapologetically crumples the empties and lobs them into the trash. Very bad. But it was me who told him DON'T DRINK THE TAP WATER HERE!!!!! Decades of chemical fertilizer, fungicides, insecticides and growth regulators seeping into the groundwater. Nurseries are little Chernobyls.

> they got real strict with the recycling

we've had a note through our door saying that we'd left the recycling out on the wrong day and don't do it again etc. only what had really happened was that the recycling people had come around earlier than usual, 7:30 or so, so the people leaving stuff out when they left for work an hour later were too late. leaflets were delivered in the afternoon. rassen frassen.

(and lots of carrier bags are now hdpe, the same as milk cartons. more trouble because they are thinner but...)

these are great uses for corrugated cardboard btw:
http://www.leokempf.com/furniture/
http://www.netropolitan.org/gehry/chair2.html

2 with occasional attempts toward 1. Curbside recycling in my city is available on a subscription basis (you pay for it) and there is a waiting list to subscribe. Luckily I live a few blocks from a drop-off point, so I usually just wait until I have filled a couple of paper bags full of recyclables, throw them and the kid into a wagon, and take a walk. They take all numbered plastics except for #6, steel and aluminum, and all glass but blue (they say it contaminates the other kinds?). Oh and paper/cardboard of course. So, most everything.

This is kind of an interesting link on my city's site on how they sort out comingled recyclables: http://stlouis.missouri.org/citygov/recycle/processing%20commingled.html

My husband used to bitch at me for recycling, he hates clutter and fears bug infestations from old food and soda. Now that I can turn over small amounts quickly, though, he seems cool.

Oh and yard waste here goes into special yard waste bins but we rarely have any, we let the grass clippings mulch themselves and don't have much else to worry about. I would like to start a worm bin!

oh jesus and the amount of plastic crap that enters your life when you have a kid! so depressing. the amount of crap, period. Most of the stuff I buy is secondhand, but still.

Worm bins are great! All you need is a biggish lidded plastic container w/ some holes drilled in the sides, a pile of shredded damp newspaper, a pound of red wigglers (the Cadillac of worms), and garbage. You can buy fancy ones, but the worms won't care.

does it smell? mr teeny hates smells.

Our produce-only one smells like dirt, or a damp forest floor, when I open the lid. Unless I put too many lemon rinds in there, those can be a little whiffy if they don't get buried or munched up right away. The worms can eat their weight in garbage every day, but they slow down if it gets too warm or too acidic. They like a nice cool shady place and egg shells to keep the pH balanced, esp if you put lots of coffee grounds in there.

I should take some pics of it.

i really should get a worm composter like that - a bunch of my friends even have them! it's just me, so could i make a half-size one, like with the smaller plastic container (1' x 8")? and just go get worms from someone who has them? i probably could

rrrobyn, you probably want something a bit bigger - maybe a 1.5' cube? That would go for a few years w/o having to sort out the worms from the dirt and start over and is easier to keep cool (more mass). Also, they can eat all your paper scraps too, pretty much. I feed mine shredded receipts and bank statements - extra protection from identity theft :)

And yeah, get worms from an existing bin, they reproduce like crazy with the right conditions (cool temp, humidity, bedding, and food). Ours started with a big yogurt container full of dirt and worms from a friend.

oh okay!
yeah i don't have a lot of space in kitchen/front-hall area - i will suss out sizes
i totally never thought about feeding them receipts and documents! that is kind of brilliant

worms are magic! I would prob keep mine in the detached garage anyway, although maybe it would get too hot? I will do more research. Thanks Jaq!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I want a wormery. But I fear I don't produce enough edible garbage.

Bunch of fucking hippy dippy, green on the outside, red to the core, crustie tree huggers...

jokes, bruv

Well, it makes me glad that someone gives a shit. You know?

x-post if that's a meme that spreads, then I really do give up on ILX. Some things should not be recycled.

:-(

It's heavy irony as raised on the "Politically incorrect guides" thread.

I always thought it was 'bear jokes', teenagers have misled me.

i don't think the council actually 'recycles' anything, but i do put the right stuff in the right bins.

Well, that's one of those Daily Express "They don't recycle it they just send it all off to Nigeria for the credit card number recycling" stories.

i don't read the express. think it was in the guardian?

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/waste/story/0,,1999745,00.html

I've read reports that lots of the co-mingled recyclables are too contaminated to make recycling economically viable. Actual recycling rates of collected material are much higher for places where you sort your own, but participation and total mass collected is higher where it's collected co-mingled.

Kate: you don't need heaps of waste to keep a worm bin going - the levels of worms adjust to the amount of waste you give them. Little amounts of half green food waste/half rough stuff like paper seems to work best.

oh damn got distracted and well whaddaya know, x-post

I've thought about getting something like composting or worms but I worry about rotting stuff attracting insects, as we've had problems with fly infestations (probably due to dead mice under the floor). We only have a small yard but we could stick something in the corner.

What Poo said. I'm really afraid of the worms thing attracting fruit flys/gnats which suck when you get a real infestation going.

Adding garden lime or chalk to reduce the acidity keeps the flies down, as does piling in the rough brown waste e.g. cardboard and fibrous veg. Also with some off-the-shelf bins, you can get covers to keep the rain and the flies out. Having said that, I'm a bit less than diligent when it comes to caring for our worms and consequently our bin is a festering pile of stinky shite that I wouldn't wish on anybody. Getting loads of brown goop out of it for compost though, and the smelly brown worm juice is good for feeding tomatoes.

Maybe bokashi might be a good bet? Never tried it myself mind you, but it's alleged not to whiff or attract flies. Looks a bit expensive to get yourself started with would be my big reservation.

Pricey indeed, that's nearly $200 for me!

Also this just sounds, bleargh:
with handy tap for draining off microbial-rich plant food !

I don't think I'm cut out for worms. Martha Stewart Living had a how-to on under the sink worm composting a few months ago. I found that a bit surprising.

You might be able to find something cheaper in the US, or bodge a homemade version somehow. Can't be difficult - you just need a box with some sort of drainage built in for the lovely brown poop juice.

So my worms will be going to a new home next month when we move. The new place, and apparently all of the Pioneer Square area in Seattle, uses a service called Cleanscape. Apparently, I buy specially marked bags for garbage, compostables, and recyclables, fill them up, leave them in the alley when full, and call or email the service for a pickup. They run 24/7. No more dumpsters in the alleys, no more rush to get things out in time for pickup. Sounds like a great deal, but I will miss the worms :(

lbhf have just made recycling 'compulsory'.

http://www.sextoyrecycling.com/images/5dollars_paper_dildo.gif

http://www.sextoyrecycling.com