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Posts Tagged ‘Recycling’

Dickinson’s Fire, Blackrod

August 3rd, 2010 No comments

One of the buildings at Dickinson’s (Station Road, Blackrod) has been ablaze this evening sending a large plume of black smoke across Bolton. At the height of the fire, Greater Manchester Fire Service had eight fire appliances and two aerial platforms in attendance with the support of two appliances from neighbouring Lancashire Fire Service.

Dickinson's Fire
Dickinson's Fire from Moss Lane Dickinson's Fire Fire Engines arriving at Dickinson's Fire, Station Road

More photos on my Flickr account and also some taken looking down from Blackrod on the Blackrod and Horwich Environmental Action Group site.

More details on the Bolton News Website, who have also published four of my photos.

Household Recycling

February 17th, 2009 2 comments

Kerbside recycling of household waste got off to a shaky start here in Bolton with some properties not given recycling containers while properties in the neighbouring street were (a farcical situation which still exists at our old address). The council also tried to reduce the non-recyclable waste collection to fortnightly without first providing sufficiently large bins for recyclable waste – an issue on which the previous council administration lost power in the local election.

I must say however that household recycling now works very well for us.

Four bins

4 binsWe now have four bins for waste collection:

  • Crimson for plastic bottles, glass bottles and jars, tin cans, drinks cans, aerosols and tin foil;
  • Beige for paper, magazines, cardboard and drinks cartons;
  • Green for garden and uncooked kitchen vegetable waste*;
  • Black for non-recyclable or ‘residual’ waste.

Oddly, according to letters in the local paper, this is somehow confusing for some folk.

The black bin is emptied every week, while the others are emptied once a fortnight. As a family of four, even with this frequency we find that we usually only need to put the recyclable bins out once a month and often find that we can skip a week on the collection of the black residual bin.

Composting

Although the green bin meant that the amount of kitchen waste going into the black bin was reduced*, we found that we had a problem with fruit flies and smells in the green bin, especially in the summer.

composterWe decided to buy a composter and settled on a ‘dalek’ type. This means that we can also dispose of other items such as eggshells and teabags which would otherwise have gone in the black bin. Unlike the green bin, you can wrap the kitchen waste in newspaper to reduce the problem of fruit flies. I would recommend doing some reading up on composting as you need to keep a balance between what are called ‘greens’ and ‘browns’.

We have been using this for over eighteen months now and have yet to take anything out of it; it just keeps rotting down. The green bin is now hardly used expect for larger garden items such as pruned branches.

So what about other stuff?

Not everything can be collected at the kerbside but used or redundant items can still be recycled or reused. Used batteries go to the local Asda who have a collection point for recycling. Anything that we no longer need but is still serviceable, particularly children’s toys and clothes, are taken to charity shops or sold. I’ve even sold a 32″ widescreen TV with a picture fault on ebay; I’d rather see someone else get use out of it whether for spares or by getting it repaired. Clothing that is worn out is usually turned into rags for use in the garage.

* I have since read a letter in the Bolton News, stating that the council are telling people that the green bin is not to be used for kitchen vegetable waste, except that the Council’s own Waste & Recycling website clearly states in the A-Z under ‘V for Vegetable Waste’ that uncooked fruit and vegetable kitchen waste can be put in your green bin. (Screenshot here in case their website is down, which is often the case)

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Bolton Recycling Weeks

January 6th, 2008 No comments

Bolton Council make recycling collections on a fortnightly basis. Addresses are assigned to a Blue or a Yellow week. You can check which week you are on at their Sort-it website, but it fails to tell you one very important piece of information: which weeks are blue and which are yellow. They do include a calendar hidden inside the free council propaganda newspaper ‘Bolton Scene’, but many people will have binned this as soon as it dropped through the door and therefore lost the calendar.

When we moved in last year, I emailed the council to ask which weeks were which and they very helpfully emailed back a well formatted excel spreadsheet showing blue days. This begs the question why this spreadsheet is not available for download on the Sort-It website.

Here, therefore, is a calendar for 2008 showing blue and yellow weeks.

Bolton Recycling Calendar for 2008 showing blue and yellow weeks

I have since found links to poor quality scanned PDFs on Bolton Council’s own blue and yellow calendars on the normal council website. Why these are missing from the Sort-It site is still a mystery.

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