Start saving your plastic bottles NOW

The fishermen should maybe abandon fishing for fish and instead use their nets to pull all the plastic waste out of the oceans. Look how much money they will make from all the recycleable plastic bottles etc. Probably more money for them doing that than they would get for the fish, and it would help rid our seas of the plastic waste!

Great for the kids to earn extra pocket money... just like the old days

Not just the kids, Aspro.  I used to collect empty Irn Bru (mostly) bottles from Glasgow building sites I was working on in the mid-90's at 20p a pop.  Feckin' hundreds of 'em lying around all over the shop!

A few years ago Tesco used to have a huge great recycling machine up here.  Paid 1 Clubcard point for every two aluminium cans.  Kept breaking down though & they got rid of it.  Good while it lasted.

Meanwhile, this'll keep Moki's fishermen busy a-while ... http://earthsky.org/earth/great-pacific-garbage-patch-bigger-than-thought
.

I can't wait. There are normally loads of them filled what I assume to be undrunk lemon cordial near any truck stop.

I'll be down there in a flash and minted!

As kids we used to jump over the wall of the local newsagents and steal the empty bottles and walk round and hand them back in, it lasted for the first two weeks of the summer holiday

I never ever ever did anything like that dan 

as I said it is the prison hulk for you and transportation

cough cough

I never ever ever did anything like that dan

Me either... lead was more lucrative

of course in some of the forces,  from 15, you could engage in all sorts of 'activities' this why some say 'put 'em in the forces etc  - I know it is not trending or twitter approved etc etc yo ho ho

Can I claim for my dandelion and burdock bottle?

It's fishermen who chuck the majority of plastic into the seas in the first place, mokegibboni. Have a look at the actual study rather than just the press release:

Our model estimates that this 1.6 million km2 accumulation zone is currently holding around 42k metric tons of megaplastics (e.g. fishing nets, which represented more than 46% of the GPGP load), ~20k metric tons of macroplastics (e.g. crates, eel trap cones, bottles), ~10 k metric tons of mesoplastics (e.g. bottle caps, oyster spacers), and ~6.4 k metric tons of microplastics (e.g. fragments of rigid plastic objects, ropes and fishing nets).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w

Land-based plastics, as anyone who lives rurally knows, are all disposed of by motorists, who each day drive into the countryside in order to throw everything they can into hedges, woodland and beauty-spots in general.

a dear friend of mine asks  'how does all this other stuff get in the european seas and to the coasts  if we are putting it in bins for recycling or other disposal' 

most of the stuff I have seen coming ashore here is domestic use  plastic,  but of course, as above, there is much more industrial/fishing gear further out.

so how much of it comes from us - I am assuming it is our plastic on our local shores or???  what??

I am guessing the movements of the oceans can shift a great deal of the tiny particles quite easily

of course it is global isn't it

anyone see the programme about plastics in Indian waters!!  horrific

There are good arguments for recycling plastics but I can't believe that many of the plastics in the sea are from bottles that got there from normal UK folk and especially UK landfill. It stinks a bit of tokenism and let's be seen to be doing something.

I'm wondering if Germany is backing off on this as previously when I went to Germany it used to be these rigid multiuse plastic "Pfand" bottles for things like coke, more recently the bottles were what we currently have here. ... Ok I see they're using the funny multiuse ones a lot less and it's now more often a one use deposit system like we intend to have here. Merkel is behind this I'll wager ;)

Wonder if the council tax will go up since our council says the money they get from us  recycling is used to keep council tax down

I'm guessing here, but I would imagine it's aluminium can recycling which provides the bulk of council income from recycling. It takes a hell of a lot of energy to extract aluminium from ore, owing to its extremely high melting point, so there's real value in recycling metal cans. In the States there's a thriving private market in collecting discarded cans for money. Over here, on the other hand, councils seem to have cornered the market, individuals get nothing, and the landscape is littered with cans, which nobody picks up (other than one or two pedestrian mugs like me, while walking the dog).

Plastic, on the other hand, is just a by-product of oil refining, so I doubt whether there's much money to be made at all from recycling plastic bottles. Could even be costing money to do so.

Happy to be put right by anyone who knows better.

i bet most of you think that recycled glass bottles go into glass but did you notice a few years ago they got rid of specific green brown clear bins

the reason why is this its cheaper to to add ground glass whatever colour to aggregate thats used in road building and its harder wearing

You sometimes spot it when the sun is low, if you're walking along rural lanes. It looks as though there's pieces of broken glass lying on the surface, until you get closer and realize they're embedded.