Recycling and black plastic

The new recycling system is pretty much all rolled out across Cotham now.  We got our green box a couple of weeks ago and we had our wheelie bins swapped for smaller ones this week... after a bit of a false start where they took the old ones and forgot to give us new ones!

It's fantastic that people can now recycling plastic and Tetrapaks from the houses without having to travel to one of the recycling points around the city.  This has boosted Bristol's recycling rate over 50% for the first time - a far cry from when the Lib Dems first came to power in the city, when it was languishing around 10%.

There are still a few teething problems locally, so do let me or Anthony know if something's not working properly for you and we'll pass it on to the powers that be.  If you want more info about what can be recycled and how, see the Council's webpages on the topic.

One particular oddity that has come up is that one type of rigid plastic that can't be recycled (thin films can't) is black plastic.  There is a sciency reason for this, which is that the light-based technology that sorts plastics into different colours when it gets to the recycling plant can't spot black!  Weird, isn't it?  This is a known scientific challenge and it's likely to be solved at some point.  In the meantime, please put it in your wheelie bins - it will be composted instead of recycled.