Love Your Wheelie Bin, Or Else

Wheelie Bins may not be the prettiest things to look at but certainly rubbish bins have come a long way from the early days of the old metal dust bins big enough for just one bag.

More recently rubbish bins have been renamed as recycle bins many of us will have various coloured bins for garden waste, metals, plastics and paper and so on, indeed there are so many types of recycle bins that they have now taken over the drive way, no longer do we have red sports cars on the drive but red wheelie bins, somewhat of a fashion statement at a fraction of the cost.

Many of you will be familiar with the green council wheelie bins, yes green is OK but hey when there's a choice of colours why choose green?. The modern wheelie bin has become more interesting in design and you can even buy sticker kits to enhance your rubbish while its waiting to be collected.

On a more serious note recycling to me is the most important aspect of the wheelie bin, now being able to reduce our carbon foot print and help save our planet for future generations to enjoy. It amazes me why we never recycled sooner, there is a saying one mans muck is another mans fortune and no more could this be truer than with recycling.

The recycling industry is now estimated to be worth over a billion pounds each year
so that's a billion pounds worth of rubbish, who would have thought it. In fact Recycling has been a common practice for most of human history, with recorded advocates as far back as Plato in 400 BC. During periods when resources were scarce, archaeological studies of ancient waste dumps show less household waste (such as ash, broken tools and pottery)—implying more waste was being recycled in the absence of new material.

It is suggested that since the use of wheelie bins recycling in the home has increased from just 12% to over 75% in 10 years, a remarkable feet by any measure.
So what are the advantages here yes its saving the planet but what's the Environmental effects of recycling?

Material ---------Energy Savings--------- Air Pollution Savings
Aluminium --------95%-------------------- 95%
Cardboard --------24%-------------------- n/a
Glass ------------5-30%------------------ 20%
Paper ------------40%-------------------- 73%
Plastics ---------70%-------------------- n/a
Steel ------------60%-------------------- n/a

So as you can see quite a difference and well worth the effort amazing to think without our humble wheelie bins these figures would be much lower. There are many modern inventions that have made a huge impact on society such as mobile phones, Concorde, and of course the microwave but only the wheelie bin helps to save the planet where as all the others do the exact opposite, something people do not consider so bare this in mind next time you dump your rubbish in the bin, its not just a wheelie bin but perhaps the most important invention of the 21st century.

Several other advantages to having wheelie bins are:

1. Bigger to fit more in meaning the trucks do not have to call as often using less fuel.

2. Fewer trucks and needed by the councils to do the curb side collections now most opt for a rotating schedule with the few refuse trucks they have.

3. They are much easier to clean, much easier to move about, and ghastly smells are well hidden.

4. Landfill sites are receiving less harmful waste than previously. Picture courtesy of beanstalk

We have a long way to go before we could be considered a truly green but I'm sure you will agree at least we have finally made a start. With recycling comes some criticism and to not mention both sides of an argument will only make me a dictator.

Now depending where you live in the world recycling can have many consequences in the western world all our recycling is done by corporations and government agencies and works well for the purpose it was designed to do however living in last fortunate places such as karung guni, Zabaleen where the more common recyclers are rag and bone man, waste picker, and junk man. With the creation of large recycling organizations that may be profitable, either by law or economies of scale, the poor are more likely to be driven out of the recycling and the remanufacturing market. To compensate for this loss of income to the poor, a society may need to create additional forms of societal programs to help support the poor. Like the parable of the broken window, there is a net loss to the poor and possibly the whole of a society to make recycling artificially profitable through law.


Because the social support of a country is likely less than the loss of income to the poor doing recycling, there is a greater chance that the poor will come in conflict with the large recycling organizations. This means fewer people can decide if certain waste is more economically reusable in its current form rather than being reprocessed. Contrasted to the recycling poor, the efficiency of their recycling may actually be higher for some materials because individuals have greater control over what is considered “waste”.

One labour-intensive underused waste is electronic and computer waste. Because this waste may still be functional and wanted mostly by the poor, the poor may sell or use it at a greater efficiency than large recyclers.

The other point is the true viability of recycling not only the cost to the environment but the financial cost, information supplied by a group of consultants and think tanks that have strong ideological objections to recycling". In 2003, the city of Santa Clarita, California was paying $28 per ton to put garbage into a landfill. The city then adopted a mandatory diaper recycling program that cost $1,800per ton. In a 2007 article, Michael Munger, the Chair of Political Science at Duke University, wrote, "... if recycling is more expensive than using new materials, it can't possibly be efficient... There is a simple test for determining whether something is a resource... or just garbage... If someone will pay you for the item, it's a resource... But if you have to pay someone to take the item away... then the item is garbage." In a 2002 article for The Heartland Institute, Jerry Taylor, director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute, wrote, "If it costs X to deliver newly manufactured plastic to the market, for example, but it costs 10X to deliver reused plastic to the market, we can conclude the resources required to recycle plastic are 10 times more scarce than the resources required to make plastic from scratch. And because recycling is supposed to be about the conservation of resources, mandating recycling under those circumstances will do more harm than good.

Which is true, however with greater use of recycling and more people, more nations being involved then over time it would become efficient, my point is to do nothing how could we possibly conserve our dwindling resources. If we all have recycle bins then of course this would add to the efficiency of recycling, just like any new business in its infancy you would have to spend more money to start with to then make it profitable in later years, just as a farmer invests in a tractor rather than a spade, recycling is the spade that will buy the tractor.

The more we get to grips with reusing the more economically viable it will become wheelie bins have a crucial role in improving efficiency, with more recycle plants popping up everywhere the competition to buy our waste from local government will increase, it will no longer be the case of paying to take it away but how much do you want to pay.

Such materials as Aluminium, Copper, Tin, and Brass have in recent years soared in value. While metals seem quite obvious in there value the time will come when plastics and cardboard will be equally as profitable.