On 30 Dec 2020 12:24:24 GMT, Tim Streater wrote:

Its hardly a green policy transporting a lorry load of air in
un-crushed bottles!

True. But it may depend on what the kit is that the recyclers have for
separating stuff. For different plastics, does their kit rely on
reading the number inside the little triangle? If so, crushing may
hide/distort both the number and the triangle.

If there is a machine that can do that reliably, at a decent speed,
over a 2' wide conveyor belt covered with randomly oriented, random
plastic bottles, trays, caps, lids etc I'd be *very* impressed.

On quite a lot of things the moulding is not very well defined and/or
is tiny (couple of mm across). I fairly recently saw something on
the telly that encoded what the plastic was into the plastic as a
whole somehow (maybe a micro pattern?) that could be quickly and
easily machine read.

And to quote from the recycling leaflet from our council:

"Please make sure all recycled materials are clean and free from food
waste to avoid attracting wildlife and vermin. Please rinse and crush
plastic bottles and cans as much as possible. There is no need to
remove labels. Please also flattened cardboard as much as possible."

Surely that should be "Please make sure all *recyclable* materials
are clean ..." they haven't been recycled yet.! And do they mean
crush all cans or only plastic ones?

Might email them again, last time they was about the blue bags still
having the previous years Christmas/New Year changes on them in
September and for this year having day and date mismatches (eg today
would be Tues 30th Dec 2020) on three days around the the same
period.

--
Cheers
Dave.