What makes you annoyed?

[Katharine]

The joke about putting glass in 'banks' rather than recycling bins in Suffolk reminded me of something that annoys me.

So many other councils collect glass from households, but not here. Where I work, guests are left a recycling bin, but quite frequently when I go to empty it, it also contains glass, as presumably wherever they are visiting from offers that service. It means I then have to put the entire contents into the general rubbish, as I can't put it in the recycling bin as it will contaminate all the carboard etc that is recyclable.

It also means that half the time my car is full of glass jars in case I go somewhere and spot a bottle bank! The other half of my boot is taken up with tetrapaks which our council stopped recycling some time ago, and I have to make an appointment to take them to our local tip from time to time. I can see why some people don't recycle as it is does take a lot of effort, and I'm lucky that I have a car. It would be extremely difficult/practically impossible for anyone without their own transport to drop off the tetrapaks, and glass is very heavy, and bottle banks around here are scarce, so people would have to make frequently and lengthy trips to get glass recycled.

[Boatbuilder]

Apart from glass, anything I can't recycle goes in the general waste bin, Katharine. There is a bottle bank a couple of hundred yards from where I live and I just drop any glass in there when I'm passing.

[Boodi 2]

Thankfully I have no such problems with recycling as there is a bottle bank about a five minute walk from our house for glass items that do not have a deposit on them. Most water, soft drink and beer bottles (both glass and plastic/PET) as well as some glass milk bottles and jars for jogurt have a deposit on them so are returned to the shop/supermarket, hence the bottle bank is only for wine and spirit bottles, oil and vinegar bottles, as well as glass jars. We also have a yellow bin for recycling plastics, tetrapacks etc., a blue bin for recycling paper and cardboard, as well as a black bin for waste that does not belong in any of the other categories. There is also a brown bin for compost/food waste, but we don't have one as we do our own composting. The blue bin (and obviously the bottle bank) are free, but there is an annual charge for the other bins.

[Hannah]

I don't think glass is collected directly from houses in Germany anywhere. Paper differs - in my home town people have their own blue bin while here I have to take paper to a paper bank. It's maybe 3 minutes to the next one for paper and 1 minute or 2 more to the next one for paper and glass.
Otherwise we have the same bins as Boodi though the yellow bin is optional - you could use special yellow plastic bags instead. These bags are annoying as they are very thin and often get torn so the waste ends up in the streets.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Glass, plastic, paper, tins, foil, cartons and batteries are all collected from households here in Wiltshire, to be recycled. Garden waste will also be collected from households if required, but there's a charge for that. What surprises me is that food waste goes into general waste. When I lived in Essex, food waste (vegetable peelings, meat bones, banana skin, etc.) was put into a separate tub and was collected from households in order to be turned into compost or fuel.

[Barnard]

In Surrey, our food waste is still collected separately.

[Katharine]

Where I live, we have a blue bin for recycling items such as plastic such as shampoo bottles, margarine tubs etc;, metal food and drink containers, foil and paper and cardboard. As mentioned earlier, we used to be able to put tetrapaks in, but can't any more. This is emptied once a fortnight, and on the same day, a brown bin is also emptied. This is for garden waste only, ie light prunings, grass cuttings etc. We used to be able to put things like potato peelings, compostable items such as takeaway coffee cups and lids, teabags and hay and straw from pet bedding, but can't do that any more.

We are encouraged to home compost, but so many houses, especially the hundreds of new builds we now have, won't have space in their gardens for a compost bin. Mind you, I've seen several of these houses with artificial grass, so no need for them to even have a brown bin!

On the alternate week to the above collection, we have a black bin which is for everything else. Thankfully we do at least have a local incinerator which produces electricity, so it doesn't all end up in landfill.

I'm trying to think if there is anywhere within walking distance of my house for recycling glass, and can't think of any. I've just had a quick Google, and there's a pub that I pass on the way to town, but the problem there is that if went there and found it was full (which does happen), I'd either have to go back home or walk round town with a bag full of empty bottles! Apparently there is another one tucked away a short walk from here, but it's not somewhere I'd normally pass so I'd have to make a special trip. I'll check out it is definitely still there, and maybe try and factor in a healthy walk round the block every now and again to drop off the bottles.

I mostly tend to drop off bottles on a trip a supermarket, but see that Sainsbury's (or at least our local one) will no longer be providing recycling facilities.

The other thing I try to recycle is thin plastic which again the council won't take. However the local Co-ops have a small container we can deposit it in. As you can picture, my car is usually half full of plastic wrappings, glass bottles and Tetrapaks - no much room for passengers. Oh and batteries - a lot of shops will take those, but I can't remember which ones, so usually have to drop those off at the tip.

[Wolfgang]

It'll become an expensive November - when I took my bike to a bike shop for inspection, it turned out that the repairs would be more expensive than the bike originally cost - okay, it's about 8 years old, if I remember correctly, and driving 2000km a year on bad streets take their toll, still...
Now it seems my faithful monochrome laser printer (bought it in 2004) starts to make a lot of issues. I suppose I'll have to replace it, too...

[Anita Bensoussane]

Sorry to hear that, Wolfgang. It's a hassle as well as an expense when things you've come to rely on wear out.

[Katharine]

Wolfgang, I hope your bike and printer don't cost too much to get fixed or replaced.

[Wolfgang]

Thanks for your concern. I already bought a new bike, and I'm afraid fixing a 20 year old printer isn't the most sensible thing to do. It still works somehow, and the times I printed things out on a daily base are long over. I hope it will last some more time with an occasional print out.

[Viv of Ginger Pop]

Those who live in the UK will be aware of the enquiry that is going on into the wrongful prosecution of sub-postmasters.

The enquiry is being held at 81 Aldwych, in the heart of London, and looked strangely familiar to me...

Yup - Chorion had their plush offices on the 4th floor. Those offices were their hq for trashing Blyton

[Lucky Star]

Maybe we could demand an enquiry into that.

[Courtenay]

Those who live in the UK will be aware of the enquiry that is going on into the wrongful prosecution of sub-postmasters.

The enquiry is being held at 81 Aldwych, in the heart of London, and looked strangely familiar to me...

Yup - Chorion had their plush offices on the 4th floor. Those offices were their hq for trashing Blyton

Maybe we could demand an enquiry into that.

Definitely.

Seriously, talking of trashing Blyton, I was in Waterstones today and saw E. Nesbit's Five Children and It — which I really enjoyed when I was little — is still in print, so I checked the current edition. Yes, the chapter where the children are playing at "Red Indians" and wish themselves into a dangerous situation involving real Indians, who capture them and attempt to scalp them but only take off their fake hairpieces, is all in there. Horrendously politically incorrect by today's standards. And I would say it is a very silly and heavily stereotyped portrayal of indigenous Americans, but it's simply a reflection of attitudes of the time, as I understood even as a child. Regardless, it's still in print, and unmodified as far as I could see. And yet plenty of other "period" books — Enid's and others — are getting bowdlerised or simply thrown out because they might teach children Wrong Ideas. Mind-boggling.

[Anita Bensoussane]

I suppose E. Nesbit's books are regarded as classics (and therefore not to be tampered with), while Enid Blyton's aren't - though some bookshops have started putting Blyton books in the "Classics" section in recent years.

I'm glad that the episode from Five Children and It hasn't been changed because E. Nesbit writes with such ease and naturalness that it would be a crime to meddle with the beauty of her prose. What E. Nesbit conjures up is very much a child's notion of "Red Indians", influenced by their depiction in The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, which Cyril is reading at the time:

Probably the day would have been a greater success if Cyril had not been reading The Last of the Mohicans. The story was running in his head at breakfast, and as he took his third cup of tea he said dreamily, "I wish there were Red Indians in England - not big ones, you know, but little ones, just about the right size for us to fight."

Scalping had gone on during E. Nesbit's lifetime and would still have been popularly associated with "Red Indians" in 1902 when Five Children and It was published, even if it wasn't actually happening any more. And The Last of the Mohicans, which is what caught Cyril's imagination, was published in 1826 so it would certainly have contained scenes of scalping.

"Red Indians", or "Cowboys and Indians", was still a popular game when I was growing up in the 1970s. "Red Indian" outfits were sold in the shops, and children (myself included!) would make headdresses from cardboard and feathers, and paint coloured stripes on our faces. My sister and I also had little plastic figures of cowboys and Indians, complete with a plastic wigwam, tomahawks and horses. Lots of shops sold them back then.

Incidentally, in E. Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) the children have a relative who is referred to as "the Indian Uncle". They eventually get to meet him and we're told by the narrator of the story (who is one of the children):

We asked him about wigwams, and wampum, and moccasins, and beavers, but he did not seem to know, or else he was shy about talking of the wonders of his native land.

Of course, it turns out that "Indian" doesn't mean what the children had imagined it meant!