Recycling Smoke Alarms

We all know that we should have smoke alarms fitted in our homes. Those alarms can be damaged and will need replacing every ten years or so anyway. So what do you do with the old ones? Chuck them in the bin? Well, the fact that they are the subject of a best practice guide on the National Household Hazardous Waste Forum suggests that this is probably not the right solution. And indeed, looking at the back of mine, I can see why:

Ionization smoke alarms contain a small amount of radioactive material, Americium 241. Looking back at the best practice guide above, there are apparently three ways to deal with it:

1. By a person authorised under section 13 of the Radioactive Substances Act 1993,
2. By returning it to the manufacturer,
3. By chucking it in the bin as long as you don't chuck in other radioactive waste and you only throw away one smoke alarm per bin bag.

Option 3 doesn't sound like recycling, while I don't know anybody who can help me with option 1. So that leaves option 2. As I've got the manufacturer's details on the back of the alarm, and their address is confirmed on their web site, that smoke alarm is going to find itself put into a jiffy bag, back to where it came from.

Note that there is another type of smoke alarms: photoelectric ones. They do not contain any dangerous material so are probably safer to dispose of. However, they are geared to detect different types of fires so for maximum protection you should have a combination of both photoelectric and ionization alarms.

For more questions on recycling stuff, have a look at the Recycle This web site.

Update

As very sensibly pointed out by Earth Notes, there may be an even easier way to deal with them: under the WEEE Directive, you can probably just give the old one to the retailer when you buy a new one.

Small Plastic Bag Madness

Following a push to eradicate the plastic bag from the United Kingdom (and London in particular), supermarkets have stopped giving the standard plastic carrier bags unless you ask for them. And even then, a lot of shops will now preferably give you a small plastic bag rather than a normal size one. On the face of it, this all sounds like a good idea as it consumes less plastic but it only looks at the very beginning of the life of a plastic bag and assumes I will throw it away once I get home. Well, no, I don't throw my plastic bags away: I reuse them. There are tons of different ways I can reuse a standard size supermarket plastic bag: as a bin liner for my kitchen bin for instance. But what can I do with the small ones they now give away? Not much! So they pile up at home. It's even got to the point where I started wondering if I needed to buy plastic bin liners for the kitchen bin as I'm now running out of standard size plastic bags!

So what could be the solution to this conundrum? Most people have two reasons to go to the supermarket: either to do a weekly food shop, in which case they will need large bags and are even quite likely these days to have their own bags, so no problem there; or they will just pop in to buy a few items that they realised they needed, in which case they may need a small bag. In that last case, it seems to me that the small plastic bag is not the right answer. A small (recycled) paper bag, similar to the ones you get in Pret or most other sandwich shop would be perfect! When I come home, I can then pop the small paper bag in my recycling green box and be done with it: much nicer and easier than dealing with a small plastic bag that is difficult to recycle or reuse.

Stop this small plastic bag madness!

Recycle Your Jeans

You've got an old pair of jeans that you can't wear anymore but that you don't want to throw away? Recycle it... into a pair of cool sandals at recycleyourjeans.com. Only for girls at the moment but a collection for boys is in the offing.

Contacting Sainsbury's

Last week I went to the Sainsbury's in Richmond as it is the only place in my area where I can recycle drink cartons. When I got there, the recycling centre was drowned under plastic bottles because the plastic bins were full and people had been dropping their recycling next to them. I put my cartons in the proper bin (which wasn't full luckily) and when I came back home I decided to contact Sainsbury's and complain. I found the contact form quite easily on their website and filled it in, half expecting to get a half cooked excuse in response. But no, to my surprise I got an email on the Monday saying they had contacted the store's manager and they were emptying those bins every day. I even got the details of the manager so next time I go there, I can theoretically talk to him directly if need be. And then later this week I got a £10 Sainsbury's voucher through the post! Could it be that Sainsbury's are actually listening to their customers? I shall see next time I go if the plastic bottles recycling bank looks better maintained. And I shall spend my voucher.

Tell me what you recycle...

Tuesday was the first day of the year the recycling green boxes were collected where I live. My box was full of the usual stuff: paper, a few bottles and cans, nothing special really. The boxes of some of my neighbours were vastly more interesting. The first one down the road contained its usual pile of newspapers, as the guy there seems to be an avid consumer of Sunday papers. He never has any bottles or cans in his box so I wonder if he ever eats in between the Sunday Times and the News of the World. The next one down had a box full of a dozen wine bottles. Obviously, there was some serious partying there! The next one down had a couple of large empty Quality Street chocolates boxes. There was some partying there as well but of a different kind.