They say 90% of Nova Scotians recycle. That’s great. I’d say about 10% actually know how to do it right. So please, do us all a favour and put a little effort into your recyclable sorting process:
*We don’t take milk*. If you bring in anything with milk in it, be it a carton, yogurt container, yop drink, milk tetra, etc, I will be docking your order per each item. My coworkers all do the same. If you saw our garbage bins (which we pay $300 a month for), they’re full of all the shit we don’t take along with the plastic bags they come in. With 40,000 units coming in a day, things pile up quick.
We don’t like caps. There’s a few simple reasons why: They all go in the garbage. Is it really that difficult to put the cap in the garbage when you’re done your beverage? You’re also helping contributing to the carpal tunnel syndrome to the people working in the back, and making the loads pile up far too quickly for them. Show a little heart- these guys work harder than anyone at the depot. Just throw the caps out, they’re going to end up in the trash either way.
For the love of God, don’t be putting 5 items in one sobeys bag, then bring in 15 of those damned bags and expect things to be done in a jiffy. There are 10 people waiting behind you to be counted, and they’re all pissed off. You’re also severely contributing to our waste. So please guys, one bag.
Don’t be bringing in your items with half a block of ice frozen to them either. Not only is this just plain stupid, we also have to wait for these items to thaw before getting them sorted. (You do know we don’t get spring till June, right?) We count our bags by weight: when half that weight is ice, we’ve got a very inaccurate count on our hands that doesn’t go over well to the guys higher up.
To the 10% I was speaking about earlier: Thank you. Thank you for taking off the caps, rinsing your bottles, bringing in only beverage containers (failsafe method kids: if you can drink out of it, survive, and not get lactose intolerance from it: we can probably take it), bringing it in easy to open bags (whether ripped or untied, doesn’t matter to me), and waiting patiently, you’re awesome and I love seeing you guys week after week.
—AJ
This article appears in Feb 12-18, 2009.
I did not know about the milk-based beverage containers not being acceptable. Logically, if you pay a deposit on it, you should be able to get the deposit back. And stores charge the deposit on all those beverages. Not plain milk, obviously, but all those flavoured milk beverages and milkshakes etc. Somebody’s screwing the consumer here.
What’s up with not being able to recycle the caps from bottles ? They are plastic too are they not ? Doesn’t make sense to me.
IF they would just stop charging me a damn tax on every container, I would stop trying to get half of it back!So you wouldn’t have to deal with pop bottles & other drink containers that haven’t been washed ( you do know about saving water right???) Let’s us 35+ million Canadians take a lesson from 50 million + Floridians who don’t recycle containers.
It works for more of them, in an area hundreds of times smaller than we live in here… so get rid of the tax & I’ll go back to burning them in my trash barrel(the plastic) & throwing them in my garbage (the glass), & saving you the trouble of an offended nose & a sore wrist !
Then you can come back here & bitch about how you’ve lost your job 😉
OK, so the bottle depot doesn’t want the bottle caps. But anyone know if HRM recycles bottle caps? I used to toss the caps in the garbage all the time, but then someone told me that HRM doesn’t care. I wonder.
I WONDER.
Bottle caps arent recycled, not because theyre made of un-recyclable material, but because its not economical to sort them out.
In the two enviro-depots Ive been to, there are long conveyors that bring opened bags up to six or seven staff memebers (if youre lucky) who are each assigned a type of material to grab ahold of. What they grab is deposited into chutes, and drop into their respective containers – however, what they dont grab off of the conveyor belt falls into another receptacle at the end of the line – which is considred garbage.
As the OP said – its just more work, and ninety nine percent of the time they dont get caught anyway.
Maybe the OPs depot is a smaller one but VWRM (Valley Waste Resource Management) and the two smaller depots in my area both seperate their recyclables in this manner, and ask us to remove the caps from the recycling bags so they end up having less waste and less work.
i think in some cases caps get left on in an effort not to attract fruit flies to fragrant bouquets of various suggary and tasty beverages…yes i know this is likely only in warmish months…but habits…you know how they are.
yes water could be used to rinse these items out…but with all the items that require rinsing(ie basically every container now known to man) thats alot of water down the drain…as was also mentioned by More. im aware that this is a problem for you OP but i doubt its done in an effort to inflict wrist injures upon our RRFB friends.
caps are made from a different type of plastic, ask the manufacturers why they use different types, has never made sense to me either.