Me too (despite the leaflet from our déchèterie saying not to). I also squeeze the open end together as many years ago I saw some footage (RSPCA, if I remember correctly) that showed animals that had got their snouts stuck inside a can and either couldn’t release themselves or cut themselves in trying to do so.
3 Likes
We clean the cans as well, going through 24 cans of cat food a week, things would get really smelly in the summer quite quickly.
1 Like
Perhaps the only benefit to our pooch having a dodgy stomach is that the only dog food he eats without it upsetting him is the dried “croquettes” stuff. Luckily for us it means no tins of wet food to worry about.
Having 9 cats ours have a varied diet, wet food, croquets, hot meals consisting of mice, voles, birds, slow worms and especially moles.
They all love cheese though 
3 Likes
Haha, we’re on a fitness regime at the moment so not eating our usual diet. Not sure who’s most annoyed about it, me and the missus or the dog 
3 Likes
I rinse everything that is being put in the recycling bins so it doesn’t smell.
2 Likes
Well, no birds have been tempted yet @Griffin36 , A robin came within a foot and then flew away after picking up some seeds. A tit was even braver and followed the seed trail to within 6 inches of the jar, but that was all. Just checked and it isn’t flowing at all, I thought that there would be some movement in a jar on its side. Is that normal? I am not exactly a Marmite aficionado. 
Marmite is thick as tar. Might get more birds interested if you spread it on toast and left some slices out
Trouble with that is I never have spare toast. I have 2 small loaves of pain de mais saved for me each week at the boulangerie and that lasts me exactly the 7 days. Fran eats no bread at all.
I’ll have a think and see what I can come up with but it is beginning to look as if avoiding scraping it out is a lost cause. 
Sounds about the right result, for Marmite 
Even the birds know to avoid it
Putting out chopped raisins with the bird seed has been going down a storm with the birds here since the snow, though. The birds are taking the raisins first ahead of the butter flakes, then the seeds.
1 Like
They have removed the public collection bins for all but glass as all recycling is now collected at the kerbside in the yellow bags provided via the Mairie. It’s picked up at the same time as your non-recyclables, in a split load collection truck.
You can still take your paper/tins/packaging recycling to the décheterrie, where you can also dispose of cartons, metals, wood, electrical items, pallets, green waste, clothing, shoes, lamps (bulbs), books, motor oil, paint, vegetable oil, & printer cartridges, all in separate skips.
I’m still appalled at the amount of stuff that does still end up in the “tout venant” skip though.
I think the “disgrace” of which you speak is caused by individuals who haven’t adapted to the newish system, or just don’t care.
And it’s these yellow bags overflowing out of the bins with yellow lids that are the problem. A tsunami of yellow bagged rubbish. I guess it’s not collected often enough.
Of course there can never be ‘kerbside collection’ in rue Olivier Basselin. We had a woman with a clipboard questionnaire glumly agreeing so the other day.
At my gate it’s 175 cms wide and a very nervous drive for a La Poste Citroen van throughout.
Two stupid boys with a delivery for me got to within 50m in a Luton, passing the width warning sign - surrounded by a ring of flashing LEDs
. Backing out verrrry slowly up a very steep incline they fried the clutch. The lane was blocked for 4 hrs before their vehicle was recovered! 
Due to lack of turning space on the public roads our collection point is 400m away, but only a few households use it. The collection is once a week but some collections haven’t happened in the past couple of week if they fell on a strike day (ours was one).
Out of curiosity I drove a small estate car down rue OB many years ago. Anyone taking anything bigger down there needs a very good reason to do so… 
My house is at the pinch point. I do worry about fire engine/ambulance.
Amazing but I saw it myself. With help from the electrician who happened to be at mine, a lwb hi-roof Transit Jumbo got thru’.
I saw the yellow bins overflowing with yellow bags again this morning 
I asked at our déchetterie about that, and they said that it’s all sorted by hand, and any recyclable stuff is taken out and put into the correct stream.
1 Like
It was exactly the same at our previous house, in the UK. Several times Luton boxes got stuck going down the 1 in 4 forwards, with the gap gradually narrowing. With that house, even if you got down in one piece with a van, there was no turning space so you had to reverse up the 1 in 4 onto a road blind.
I’m talking about the things that are deemed to be non-recyclable at the déchetterie. I’m aware that the household yellow bag stream is sorted later.
For instance we used to have a skip specifically for placo destined to be recycled, but that now gets slung into the landfill skip.
The staff here are pretty good at getting people to put stuff in the right skips.
Yes, me to. We dont have the system you have. We have roadside general waste and recyclable waste bins that are emptied every week. At the déchetterie, there is a ‘general’ skip with all the others and if what you have isn’t recyclable, doesn’t fit into a particular category or if it has multiple different recyclable elements to it, it goes into general. That is then hand sorted at the recycling centre and for example, items with multiple recyclable elements are taken apart and put into the relevant streams. This is how it was described to me.
I don’t want to be picky, honest, but to a couple of you who have mentioned Lutons and Luton vans, this does not accurately describe the size of vehicles involved. A Luton is simply a type of body work where the loading space is extended over the cab, that bit being called ‘the Luton head’.
I think you probably mean Transit sized light vans but would point out that great big pantechnicons and even max weight 8 wheelers can be Lutons. If I am wrong and you are really talking about those then you do have my greatest sympathy.
Back to the Marmite, as far as I can tell, no Tits or anything else, have been anywhere near it save for that brave soul yesterday. But the good news is that I have got the trail cam working, no idea what I was doing wrong before.
1 Like
Any plastic material with food residues on (or in) it CANNOT be recycled. In order for plastics to be transformed into recycled goods, they must be of decent quality.
Or possibly not happening at all
2 Likes