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Denis the Dustcart

Information and advice about recycling and waste in Exeter from the city's most famous emoji dustcart, Denis. Thank you.

Recycling Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) are answered below the 'Page Rules'. Page Rules:

We’re happy to help you in any way that we can and look forward to seeing your views and feedback. We do however expect our users to offer us the same level of courtesy that we offer them, so we have a short set of house rules:

1. All users must comply with the social media platform’s Terms of Use as wel

l as these Terms of Use.
2. We will remove, in whole or in part, posts that we feel are inappropriate or discriminatory against any individual or group.
3. We will block and/or report users on our social media channels who post messages at us which we believe are:

- Abusive or obscene
- Deceptive or misleading
- In violation of any intellectual property rights
- In violation of any law or regulation
- Spam (persistent negative and/or abusive posts in which the aim is to provoke a response)

4. You are wholly responsible for any content you post including content that you choose to share. Anyone repeatedly engaging with us using content or language which falls into the above categories will be blocked and/or reported to the associated social media platform. Recycling A-Z for Exeter:

https://exeter.gov.uk/bins-and-recycling/recycling/a-z-of-recycling-waste-and-materials/a/

19/06/2026

I’ve been told by some people – quite seriously – that I’m sometimes too funny for my own good.

Apparently, this means I can’t be taken seriously.

Which, I’ll admit, I find quite funny.

Here’s the thing: I do take waste and recycling seriously. Very seriously, in fact. Seriously enough to know that if you drone on about it in a monotone, most people will switch off faster than a telly in a power cut.

Humour works – even questionable humour. It grabs attention. It keeps people listening. And – crucially – it makes the message stick. Being amusing doesn’t make the message trivial, and it certainly doesn’t make it insincere. It just makes it… heard.

As long as the facts are right and the message is clear, that’s what matters.

Not everyone agrees, of course. Some people think seriousness must always look and sound serious – long faces, stern voices, and about as much joy as a filing room. They might, perhaps, permit themselves an exclamation mark to suggest they understand fun.

Frankly, if that’s the rule, we’re doomed.

Because the truth is… well, the world's in a big mess, isn't it. A very big one, actually. A bigger mess than a giant’s compost loo after an earthquake.

So yes, things need to change. But you can't restore a Monet with the colour pallet of a car park. It’ll just make people stop caring altogether.

And I’m not interested in that. Nor am I interested in becoming so relentlessly earnest that I bore myself senseless – because if I’m bored, you definitely will be.

So I’m not going to stop having a bit of fun with it. What I talk about is too important to bore people with. Humour is too important.

Because humour isn’t a distraction from the message – it’s the delivery system. It’s how you get through to people who might otherwise never give the subject a second thought.

And if that means some people think I’m not serious enough? Well, that’s fine. I'll probably never convince them, and they aren't the people I need to amuse – or the people I need to listen.

18/06/2026

Things you DO need to do when recycling.

No. 1: recycle only the right things.

✅ Effective, value-for-money recycling starts at home. Putting the right items in the right bin helps make sure more materials are actually recycled, which keeps the service running as efficiently as possible, protects income, and reduces costs.

When the wrong things go in the bin, it takes more time and money to deal with them later, which makes it harder to keep costs down for everyone.

Leave out things like:

❌ nappies
❌ food waste
❌ polystyrene
❌ crisp packets / pet food pouches
❌ clingfilm
❌ compostable packaging/bags

The wrong items can:

❌ waste time and money in sorting it from actual recycling
❌ contaminate the whole load, meaning recycling is sent for disposal
❌ damage machinery and risk the safety of staff.

If in doubt, ask me or check my A-Z: exeter.gov.uk/recycle.

Bin collection is often assumed to be a major part of what council tax pays for, because it’s the one council service everyone sees every week. In reality, the proportion of your council tax that helps fund waste and recycling collections is tiny.

It’s important to understand where council tax goes. It isn’t all spent by your local district council (who collect your bins) – it’s shared across organisations including the county council and emergency services like police and fire. The vast majority of funding goes towards services such as social care, education, highways and emergency response.

Recycling isn’t just about reducing waste; it also generates an income that helps fund public services, including the cost of running the waste collection service itself. The better the quality of recycling, the more value it has. When the wrong items are put in, or materials are contaminated, the cost of sorting it increases and the value of the material itself is lowered or lost.

Now, rubbish disposal – including anything that has to be rejected from recycling – costs the public purse £180 per tonne at the Energy from Waste plant. So it’s a double whammy: increased disposal costs, reduced income from recycling.

Those extra costs don’t just disappear – they ultimately fall on the public. Put simply, taking a moment to sort waste properly at home helps protect the value of recycling, reduce avoidable disposal costs, and keep the service more affordable for everyone.

17/06/2026

Things you don’t have to do when recycling – No. 4.

You DON’T need to crush cans or bottles.

You may want to, for therapeutic reasons, but you don’t have to.

We have machines that squash them all into cubes and bales, ready for stacking in the back of a truck and transporting to reprocessors in the UK that will turn them back into cans and bottles.

If you lack space in your green bin, by all means crush away to your heart’s content. Just make sure you put the lids back on any bottles afterwards, because those will be separated during the recycling process and recycled. Lids on their own tend to get lost or fall through machinery.

Whatever you do, don't try to crush the bottle with the lid still attached. If you do, one of several disasters may occur:

a) your knee will bounce straight back into your face
b) you’ll slip off the bottle, lose your balance, stumble down the hall, crash through the front door, blunder down the street, and spend the whole day in a falling run
c) if you perform a two-footed leaping crush, you’ll either ricochet backwards through the window or rebound through the ceiling, leaving your top half upstairs and your legs still in the kitchen
e) if you're outside, you'll be launched into a low orbit before dropping back to earth who knows where, depending on the wind direction.

Not worth the risk, when you think about it.

16/06/2026

Things you DON’T need to do with your recycling, No. 3.

You DON’T need to make sure everything you put in your green bin is sparkling clean. It just needs to be empty.

You may want to, but you don't HAVE to.

👨‍🔬 Have you heard of Einstein’s Theory of Relatively Clean Recycling?

E=MC².

Empty = Mostly Clean (squared by the contents of the bin).

This shows us that more recycling gravitates towards the green bin when less effort is required to get it there.

It also models how a smear of sauce in a baked bean can is fine, because it won’t spread and contaminate the load, but half a tin of baked beans will cause significant contamination of the other recycling.

When we put Einstein’s theory into practice, however, we discovered something else.

Something absolutely extraordinary.

That smear of sauce had no effect whatsoever on the ability of furnaces to melt the can at 1000ºC.

The sauce just disappeared without a trace.

Likewise, half a gram of yoghurt did not prevent machines from washing the yoghurt pot during the recycling process and therefore it did not act as a blocker to recycling.

In recent years, other scientists have come up with theories explaining how giving your cans a quick swill in old washing up water will help reduce odours in your green bin while saving on water bills, but the original Theory of Relatively Clean Recycling is nonetheless widely accepted as fact among recycling collectors, sorters and reprocessors.

Ultimately, whether or not you wash your recycling is down to you. All we ask is that it’s empty.

Unrinsed milk bottle – fine.

Inch of milk – not fine.

One baked bean in a smear of sauce - fine.

Inch of beans - not fine.

15/06/2026

Clothes banks are not dumping grounds – and charities can’t carry the cost of our waste.

Charities like the Salvation Army rely on clothing donations they can actually sell. When bags of clothes are left on the ground, they immediately become unsellable and can only be thrown away.

Leaving clothes beside a full clothes bank may feel like the right thing to do. It may even feel charitable.

It isn’t. It’s fly tipping – and it doesn’t matter what the intention was for leaving the clothes there.

From the moment clothes are left around a bank, they stop being donations and become waste. Even when bagged, they usually have to be thrown away at real cost to the charity or the council.

The Salvation Army responds quickly when a bank is reported full, but more frequent emptying isn’t the answer. Charities have to balance service with cost, and when too many donated items can’t be sold, collection costs rise while income falls.

The issue isn’t collection frequency. It’s overconsumption driven by fast fashion and hardship, the decline of repair-and-reuse habits, and a growing tendency to treat personal waste as someone else’s responsibility.

If a bank is full, no-one has any right to leave clothes beside it. It may feel considerate, helpful or generous, but it’s simply irresponsible waste disposal. It shifts the burden onto charities and the council.

Those disposal costs don’t vanish. They come from the charity’s funds or from the public purse, reducing money available for other vital services.

Fast fashion is a major part of the problem. Cheap clothing can feel like the only option when money is tight, but it wears out quickly, costs more over time, and is often impossible to reuse or resell. That pressure is real, but the result is a growing mountain of textile waste with nowhere to go.

That’s the hard truth: there’s no easy recycling solution for much of this material. A lot of it can’t be reused, exported or recycled. The countries that once bought our poor-quality textiles no longer want them – and why should they? So when low-quality clothing is donated, charities pay to dispose of it. When it’s dumped, councils pay to clear it away – and usually it’ll have attracted even more fly tipping.

Charity shops and clothes banks are not a guilt free solution for worn out clothing. They are a vital part of textile reuse, but only when they are used properly.

It isn’t anyone’s right to leave bags of clothes beside a clothes bank. The same applies to any other waste, even if it’s at a recycling site. It's an offence, regardless of intent.

Supporting charities means donating responsibly, not expecting them – or the council – to manage our waste. If we want charities to survive and public money to be spent where it’s needed most, we all need to take responsibility for what we throw away.

We all have obligations when using a recycling bank:

• check whether a bank is full
• if it is, try another bank or take items home
• only donate clean, dry, reusable clothing
• don’t leave anything on the ground – ever.

12/06/2026

Denis’s World Cup Guide!

(Err… recycling guide, that is.)

⚽🍺 Drinks

Recycling drinks cans is a bit like watching England's ‘Golden Generation’ from the early noughties: they start off full of promise, they're empty before you know it, they're worth plenty, and they're destined to repeat the same result again and again.

But recycling all your cans after the final whistle will still cheer you up after the disappointment, like a nice cup of tea after your car’s been towed. You don’t need to crush them like English dreams in a quarter final – we have machines that do that – but you can if it will help you express your dissatisfaction.

Every can counts. Aluminium is one of the most recyclable and valuable materials you bring into your home, so make sure it leaves your home in the recycling truck. Your cans deserve extra time, unlike Roy Hodgeson after the Iceland match at Euro 2016.

🍿⚽ Takeaways

Pizza boxes can be recycled, even if they’re almost as greasy as Beckham’s early hairdos. So can chip boxes, minus the any chips and greaseproof paper.

Plastic takeaway tubs can often be reused until they’re as ineffective as England’s Golden Generation at the 2010 World Cup, at which point you should recycle them.

Save leftovers and put any that won’t get eaten in your food waste caddy, including bones. Get familiar with the process and sort it properly to avoid making a mess of everything, learning by example from England’s penalty shootout lineups at Italia 90, Euro 96, France 98, Euro 2004, Germany 2006, Euro 2012, and Euro 2020.

🌍🏆 Hosting a watch party

Give your recycling extra attention, like a manager with favourites.

After the party, as you’re storming out of the room, do a quick recycling sweep. Use two bags: one for recyclables, one for your dreams of glory.

Storming out is fine, but storming out responsibly is elite.

🧺⚽ Fan zone picnic

Single-use packaging is like David Nugent’s England career – on once, did the job, and never seen again.

Your old tubs, plates and cutlery, on the other hand, are your proper mainstays. First names on the team sheet, like many from England’s Golden Generation, and never let you down, unlike many from England’s Golden Generation.

Make your own sandwiches and reuse tubs rather than buying packaged sarnies from the shop. Bring a reusable drinks bottle. Take all recyclable packaging home, if recycling facilities aren't available.

Sing ‘it’s coming home’ to get everyone in the mood for taking their recycling home rather than sticking it in a litter bin.

11/06/2026

Are they cans or are they tins? They're made of steel, in any case, and smelting them burns away the labels as if they were nothing.

But forget trying to soak the labels off in the washing up bowl after a twenty-minute post-dinner dish-scrubbing sesh, just so the paper can be recycled. It can't be.

The paper is such poor quality that peeling it off and hanging it on the washing line to dry is simply a waste of effort. It isn't designed for recycling.

Many of the labels have wet-strength adhesive anyway, so that they can survive being put in the fridge - making them doubly difficult to remove. But the real issue is that they will be made from fillers and short fibres, so your carefully preserved label will likely just turn to mush in the papermill – a slop that will just plop through machines rather than becoming a pulp that can be turned back into paper.

If this kind of paper is mixed in with better paper (like newsprint, office paper, envelopes, magazines, etc.), it will just dilute the potential of that paper to be recycled into quality paper again.

When the can is recycled with the label still attached, the paper will just be burned away in the furnace when the can is melted down. Steel recycling furnaces reach 1000°C, so the label is pretty insignificant compared with the bulk of the steel.

It may seem like a waste of paper, but this is the reality of the situation.

10/06/2026

Things you DON'T need to do when recycling - No. 1.

You DON'T need to remove labels, sleeves and lids from bottles - but there are some things you can do to help make recycling more effective.

My suggestions as follows.

👍 DO remove:

▪️ shrink-wrap from clear plastic bottles (soft drinks, milk shakes, meal replacement shakes, etc.) - and only if you are able to do this easily.

🤙 DON'T bother to remove:

▪️ any lids
▪️ labels on milk bottles
▪️ labels on coloured bottles (including white)
▪️ labels on any bottle where the label isn't an all-over wrap (like on large fizzy drink bottles or water bottles).

So what's the deal? 🤷

Generally speaking, lids and labels will be separated from the bottle during the shredding process. The whole bottle is shredded and then the flakes are washed, which loosens any adhesive.

The washed flakes are then sent into a water tank, where the different types of plastic (lid, bottle, label) float or sink differently, depending on their composition.

Friction washers and filtration systems can further separate the different materials.

Modern recycling technology has outpaced public messaging, and many of the messages that stuck with people years ago – ‘plastic shrink-wrap means they can’t recycle the bottle’ – are out-of-date... up to a point

The fact is, this technology has only had to evolve because of all the different polymers used in the construction of these bottles, and it would be far easier and less resource-heavy if all bottles were just plain and each was constructed of a single polymer.

It would also be easier in the first place for optical sorters (and human eyes) to identify the polymer types if there was no giant colourful sleeve in the way, so fewer clear bottles (which can be recycled into clear bottles) would slip through to be mixed in with cheaper coloured ones (which can't) just because they are shrink-wrapped in a colourful design.

But that doesn't align with making things as appealing as possible to sell as many things as possible.

So, the main concerns from a recycling (though not from a retailer's) point of view are:

▪️ misidentification of polymer at the first sorting stage and missed opportunity to recycle it back into a valuable product
▪️ how much energy it takes to remove it from the bottle
▪️ the waste of material used for the shrink-wrap for the sake of energetic branding.

🫤 What, then, should you do?

If you remove the labels, the bottles will still go through the same shredding and floatation system - but by removing the all-over shrink wrap, you are making the bottle more identifiable.

The label material MAY be recycled, if everything is shredded together and separated by floatation – though not into high-value products. The different materials will end up in separate streams, and if the label material stream is clean and consists mostly of one polymer then it may be recycled into lower-grade plastic products such as plastic lumber, crates, storage bins, etc..

Or it may not. It may just be sent to energy recovery. It really depends on how the economics stack up.

If you are meticulous and remove the labels yourself, it doesn’t improve the overall recyclability of the label material - but you can choose to take it to a supermarket collection point, having diligently researched where each chain send their soft plastic loads and what those loads become (if anything).

Either way, the most the labels will ever become is low-grade composite products – definitely not another label.

As for the lids, they will always stand a better chance of being recycled when you leave them on the bottle - but what they become depends, again, on what they are made from.

Removing the lids and putting them in your green bin separately just ensures the lid stands no chance of being recycled, because it will either get lost, fall through machinery, or escape the clutches of human pickers and machines.

So leave the lids on, and most of the labels are fine to stay on the bottle. If you do want to go the extra mile, only remove the shrink-wrap that obscures the nice clear plastic bottle underneath.

09/06/2026

Takeaway pizza boxes and chip boxes with a bit of grease can be recycled, as long as they aren't saturated with oil or fat or badly soiled with food.

A bit of grease doesn't stop cardboard from being recycled. During the reprocessing stage, the paper fibres are mixed with water and cleaned, and minor grease residues are removed.

However, boxes that are soaked through with grease or covered in food can contaminate the recycling stream, reducing fibre quality or rendering the material unrecyclable. They can also contaminate other paper in the load - the grease either leaks or acts like a magnet.

If a box is saturated, tear off and recycle the clean sections, then place the heavily contaminated parts in the rubbish bin.

Bits of melted-on cheese and sauce should be picked off and put in your food waste. Any uneaten crusts and chips should likewise be removed and dropped in your food caddy, if they can't be saved in the fridge for later.

The crews won't collect a recycling bin where they see it contains leftover food, but they won't reject the bin for the sake of a smear of sauce.

There is an old adage that applies to recycling: when in doubt, don't. If you aren't sure, clean and dry cardboard is always the best choice for your green bin - but honestly, a bit of grease isn't a deal breaker.

08/06/2026

♻️ WHY SHOULD YOU BOTHER LEARNING WHAT CAN AND CAN’T BE RECYCLED?

Sorting your recycling properly helps make sure the system works as it should. We aren’t asking you to do something we should be doing.

Putting everything “technically recyclable” in your home recycling bin and expecting the council to just sort it is a bit like throwing all your washing – whites, colours, woollens, muddy clothes – into one load and expecting the washing machine to sort it out: all the clothes are technically washable, but you’ll likely end up ruining a lot of perfectly good pieces unless you treat them right.

The difference here is, of course, that the labels on clothes give very specific and accurate instructions about how to wash them correctly while the labels on food packaging are often about as consistent as a British summer or as logical as a treasure map with half the clues missing that leads, if only you knew it, to a bin bag full of incomplete treasure maps.

This is why I, and other council recycling pages, try to support you to sort your recycling as effectively as you can at home.

💷FIXING MISTAKES ISN’T FREE

Council tax doesn’t only pay for your bin collections. In fact, hardly any of it does.

It covers a wide range of services, and most of it gets paid to the emergency services and to the regional council (e.g. Devon County Council) for roads and schools. The proportion your district council (e.g. Exeter City Council) receives for your waste collections is extremely small – under £1 per week per household.

What this means is that when residents recycle incorrectly, there isn’t spare funding sitting there to absorb the cost. Instead, it creates additional expense. Materials have to be checked, separated and removed. If the contamination is too high, it can impact on all the recycling around it, which may all have to be treated as rubbish – a loss of recycling income on the one hand and greater disposal expenditure on the other.

While recycling generates an income for public services, rubbish disposal is chargeable to the public purse at over £180 per tonne. The difference between income from recycling and expenditure from disposal has a significant effect on what councils have to spend, which impacts on other services and ultimately drives up costs for the public.

🏭 RECYCLING ONLY WORKS IF IT’S TAKEN SERIOUSLY BY EVERYONE

Recycling isn’t just about collection; it’s part of a supply chain. Materials collected from households are sold on to be turned into new products. When the right materials are properly sorted, they have value and generate income that helps support public services.

Yes, we sort your recycling well in our Materials Reclamation Facility, but the more rubbish we get in, the more time we have to spend sorting that as well. When the wrong things go in the bin, sorting them eats away at the income generated by the right materials.

Then there’s contamination.

When food or liquids contaminates the paper pile, for instance, the value of that paper might disappear entirely. It isn’t only about the original item, but the impact it has on anything it touches.

The better the material, the more effective and affordable the whole process becomes.

Which leads me on to…

⚠️ THE PROBLEM WITH “WISHCYCLING”

Putting something in the recycling “just in case” might seem helpful, but it often has the opposite effect. It actually just creates extra work at sorting facilities where incorrect materials have to be removed.

🤝 EVERYONE HAS A PART TO PLAY

There’s no doubt that manufacturers and retailers need to take greater responsibility for the materials they produce. That’s where some of the biggest changes need to happen.

However, recycling only works when every part of the system plays its part. Councils collect the material, facilities process it, and manufacturers reuse it, but it all stalls unless residents put the right things in the right bin. When you get it right, everything that follows becomes more efficient and more cost-effective.

Of course, it would help massively if companies stopped making such awful packaging and stopped pulling the green wool over our eyes with sweeping statements about the sustainability of their redesigned packaging, which usually means they’ve solved one problem by making two more in other areas.

But recycling isn’t just about protecting the environment. Doing it right makes a real difference for everyone who relies on the public services provided by councils.

Address

Exton Road
Exeter
EX28NR

Telephone

+441392265010

Website

https://exeter.gov.uk/recycle

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