London Environment Strategy consultation

Recycling for people in flats are real problems where we live. I live in a block of flats and we never had recycling bins. I had to phone council to give us one.
The real issue is that we have no idea and are not educated how and what we should be recycling (which plastics? Do we wash the recyclable items? What if they are wet? Cardboard boxes to be flattened? Etc) in addition to the problem of lazy people just using as dumping ground.

Further more there are absolutely no help regarding food waste which are a huge proportion is what we can actually recycle.
I called my council and they were totally uninterested. Councils offer subsidised compost bins but you need a garden which only exists for lucky people in my council. Won’t bins are not practical. Councils should be doing so much more to reduce food waste as well. I spoke to some business owners in my council. They just dump everything including food and recyclables in one bag they pay.

We get told we have to recycle and reduce waste including food but if councils and government don’t help and educate us (more fund for food waste collections from flats where most of us in London live!) then this waste problem won’t be solved. We will all be sending all rubbish to landfill even if we don’t want to.

I’m fed up with the unwillingness of my councils to recycle including food waste. I called many times and they are simply hopeless. London is very behind in recycling both materials and food waste.

We live in a block of 30 flats two stories high on a footprint shared with a small block of sheltered housing in SW15, we have a common recycling enclosure containing three large bin. Our problem is the persistent dumping of general detritus and redundant furniture by non-residents in the area on an almost industrial scale that's turning an attractive little estate into an eyesore, the solution would appear to remove council charges for dumping house clearances into the Smugglers Way recycling facility in nearby Wandsworth to encourage the fly tippers to use it instead.

I've pretty much given up trying to recycle in my flat. We carefully sort our recyclables, wash them out, etc etc, take them out to the blue bin - to find that the other flats have dumped food waste and plastic bags in the bin. So the council won't take them. As of right now the blue bins have been there - uncollected - full of food waste and maggots and flies for over a month. In very London fashion the other residents just don't care. It's always 'not my problem'. I am on the point of emptying the blue bins myself into the black bins and glueing a big picture of a plastic bag with a red line through it on each bin lid...

I live in a flat which recycles and has rubbish collection in large bins rather than roadside collection. This is great because it means that there is no unsightly waste on the street or bins blocking anything. It also means that we can put almost everything in mixed recycling and anything else in waste. The only downside is that there is not any food waste disposal.
I would like to see some areas of camden follow this lead rather than having waste on the streets. They should follow places like bristol which put those big bins on the end of the street in an area, doesn't look unsightly and then each house/flat gets a key to the bins. They are emptied once a day and twice on weekends and then there are no issues with putting waste out at incorrect times or stuff starting to smell.
Obviously in most new builds these bins are placed in the basement or ground floor which helps, but i would like to see these provided for old builds too on street corners.

I am the Treasurer, one of four directors, who mange the block of 21 flats where I live in Enfield. We have a 1200 litre reycling bin plus a smaller organic waste recycling bin for food etc where we do have to buy our own compostable bags. Most folk do recycle, but there are one or two, despite letters, who still throw cardboard and other recyclable items in the ordinary bin.

We also encourage folk to wash anything that they want to recycle, in order not to contaminate the recycling bin.

I'm all for it - the more we can recycle the better.

We have communal recycling and standard rubbish bins. However people are incredibly lazy and dump non-recyclable waste in with waste that can be recycled. I don't know if this means that it is all sent to landfill or if it is separated. I would feel very annoyed if the time that we take to separate everything is wasted because the recycling has been "contaminated" with standard household waste. We live in Southwark.

There's a fair amount of willingness to recycle in our flats in North London but the council don't include our flats on the blue bin run (which in our area is for recycling paper/cans/cardboard etc.) & only at extra cost will they include the flats on the garden waste circuit.

You'd think that there would be a good amount of recycling potential from a whole street of flats; I find it quite sad that when I put out all 10 of our wheelie-bins on a Friday morning a good 50% of the material in them is newspapers, card, cans & bottles - all going straight to landfill.

Many of the residents in the flats are not mobile enough to get to town to use the recycling bins there & a lot of the rest of them won't bother unless the recycling bin is right there.

It seems like a wasted opportunity to improve the area's (& nation's) recycling levels.

I live in a flat in Tower Hamlets. You have to use Tower Hamlets recycling bags, but they won't deliver these. You have to collect them and show ID at the nearest library. Even when you do this, they'll only give you 1 roll. This return journey takes around an hour for me, and as a busy person it's not realistic that I'll do this on a regular basis. So it prevents me from recycling most of the time.