Are councils doing enough to recycle old furniture?
- Spring cleaning has come late for me this year, in fact it is more summer cleaning but it still has to be done.
Whilst I am what I consider to be an Eco-friendly person, there is no getting away from it that councils are not doing enough to help us recycle.
Point in question; old flat-pack furniture, what do you do with it?
Surely it can be recycled? Yes a lot of flat-pack is naff old chipboard with a veneer coating on top, but can this not be ground down to create more chipboard furniture at least?
The government is constantly going on about us recycling, yet I do not see a deluge of recycling centres offering a viable alternative to simply dumping old furniture.
Let’s be honest any signs you see for recycling centres are nothing more than rebadged tips.
How many people only have recycle collections twice a month? This is hardly pro-active, and is no encouragement to the public who in my opinion would love to recycle more, the simply fact is recycling facilities are not available.
The old desk and hi-fi unit that I have begrudgingly chopped up were taken to the local municipal tip and shoved in with the rest of the rubbish. Why is my local council not doing more to segregate the various types of rubbish. Yes there are some sections at the tip for electrical equipment, batteries and green waste. It does strike me as though councils are only interested in handling ‘easy’ green waste such as grass or large electrical.
To be fair, I don’t want to just through my old stuff way, I would rather know that somewhere the old chipboard is going to be recycled. You have to wonder as to how much flat-pack furniture is disposed of each week in the UK? I am sure it is a mind-boggling amount.
Ultimately, this is happening because councils are not doing enough to make recycling easy. In fact my local council (like many others) penalise you for putting too much recycling out!
Perhaps if each council were to create a post for a refuse tzar who could then visit household in the borough we might start getting somewhere.
Perhaps if councils would create proper recycling facilities, people would be more interested.
Perhaps if councils also offered incentives for people to recycle, then more people would do it.
I am sure there must be the council who is doing their bit really well, but this would be the exception to the rule.
I want to recycle, but unless the facilities are in place what are we supposed to do other then keep chucking stuff away?
Written by EcoGirl on June 2nd, 2008 with
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