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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 well 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/

Tips for picking pumpkins, since you need to book well in advance nowadays to get anywhere near a field.1. Bend at the k...
13/10/2026

Tips for picking pumpkins, since you need to book well in advance nowadays to get anywhere near a field.

1. Bend at the knees, not at the waist…

Only joking.

🎃🍽1. Pick a pumpkin you can actually eat.

Organic, local, imported, artisanal or hallowed by druids under a full moon – it means little if your pumpkin moulders on the doorstep until Bonfire Night.

Many carving pumpkins are barely more edible than a scarecrow: stringy as straw and about as appetising as a boiled hessian sack. Rescuing a few seeds is the culinary equivalent of buying a 4x4 for the cupholders.

Throwing one away doesn’t just waste the pumpkin: it wastes the water, fertiliser, land and fuel used to grow and transport it.

🎃⛽2. Don't obsess over pumpkin miles, but do factor it in.

The journey to pick up your pumpkin can add more to its footprint than anything else, so driving twenty miles solely for a pumpkin is obviously a factor.

But if you were going out for a family walk anyway, and it happens to involve a wheelbarrow and a muddy pumpkin field, the calculation is less clear-cut.

A pumpkin grown in a nearby field isn’t automatically greener than one collected with the weekly shop, but neither is every picking trip an environmental disaster. Your trip is also family time and you’re supporting local growers.

Keep it simple: combine journeys where possible.

🎃😄3. Have some fun

If hunting for the perfect pumpkin is part of your family’s Halloween, crack on.

Children gain more from fresh air, the hunt for ‘the one’, and carving a real pumpkin than from the equivalent time spent poking glowing pixels. Making something with your hands never goes out of fashion.

Plan the aftermath: soup, curry, pie, roasted wedges, cake, spiced pumpkin decaf oat milk latte – whatever works.

Fun and environmental responsibility need not sit on opposite shoulders, whispering conflicting advice. If we can’t justify a muddy afternoon with family, a wonky jack-o’-lantern, a bowl of pumpkin soup, and memories that linger longer than a rectory ghost, what exactly are we saving the planet for?

(I mean, personally I don’t actually like pumpkin soup, so I’m open to suggestions for tastier alternatives.)

13/10/2026

22 libraries across Devon are hosting Halloween Swaps this October, helping their local communities to fight Halloween waste by reusing costumes! 🧛‍♀️

Head on down to participating libraries to
👻 Donate,
🎃 Swap or
👽Rehome a new to you costume for free!

Find a list of participating libraries via the link in the comments 👇



CAG Devon Libraries Unlimited Devon County Council North Devon Council East Devon District Council South Hams District Council West Devon Borough Council Exeter City Council Torridge District Council Teignbridge District Council Torbay Council Denis the Dustcart

You don’t need to remove shrink-wrapped labels from plastic bottles before recycling them.Life's already full of enough ...
12/10/2026

You don’t need to remove shrink-wrapped labels from plastic bottles before recycling them.

Life's already full of enough fiddly obligations.

I know – it seems odd. The recycling industry spent decades telling you to separate your waste, only to relax about something made of multiple plastics once considered a recycling nightmare.

Fear not! I shall explain 😊

The bottle goes through the stages of the recycling process dressed just as it arrives: in cap and skin-tight clothing like a 90s Tour de France winner.

It’s then chopped into small flakes and washed – and this is where the interesting bit happens.

The different plastics are different densities, so they separate in flotation tanks. What arrived as one item now becomes several.

Now that systems have evolved around the challenge, it’s easier than dealing with paper labels stuck on with glue.

Because that's the thing: shrink sleeves did not become popular because recyclers asked for them. They became popular because they turn an entire bottle into advertising space. And if there's one lesson from modern consumer society, it's that almost everything revolves around advertising space.

A bottle starts life as a drinks container, spends a few days as a miniature billboard, and only later becomes a recycling problem.

Marketing departments invent something eye-catching, consumers respond to it, manufacturers sell more of it, and recycling engineers disappear into a room to work out what on earth to do with it.

Most of the time, they succeed. Sorting improves. Detection improves. Washing improves. Facilities learn how to separate materials that weren’t invented with separation in mind.

In other words, recycling adapts around marketing where it can. When it can’t, packaging eventually has to change.

A plastic sleeve on a drinks bottle, however, no longer qualifies as a challenge.

So yes, removing the label yourself saves a little processing effort. But only a little.

Recycling plants fully expect bottles to arrive wearing all their clothes. If they relied on millions of households carefully peeling everything apart beforehand, the industry would be built entirely on hope.

Hope, however, isn’t a process.

Exciting developments in yoghurt pot engineering.Some of them are now being made from clear plastic.I know. I needed a m...
09/10/2026

Exciting developments in yoghurt pot engineering.

Some of them are now being made from clear plastic.

I know. I needed a minute to compose myself, too.

But seriously, it is interesting. Relatively speaking.

The old white ones were generally made from polystyrene sheet. Not expanded polystyrene, obviously: the material comes in different forms and only the yoghurt-pot-style stuff is recyclable from home.

So it’s not as though they weren’t recyclable before. They were – in the same way that a microwave burger is technically food. They could be turned into lower-value composite plastics.

Now, though, some manufacturers are switching from white polystyrene to clear PET – the same family of plastic as used for drinks bottles.

Why? I mean, isn’t this all a bit like using laser-guided surveying instruments to draw a hopscotch grid?

No, it’s a completely necessary move.

Because clear PET has the potential to become high-quality clear PET again. White polystyrene sheet will only be mixed into plastic soup for turning into things like park furniture.

Both are useful, but only one reduces the need to produce packaging from virgin polymer.

Here in Exeter, we own a sorting facility and use a UK outlet that takes PET and turns it into new PET – so that clear pot has every chance of staying clear and coming back for another lap.

Purity is the whole game. Sending clear PET into a mixed plastic recycling stream would be like a recycling a Stradivarius violin into a fence post. Sort of.

Fewer colours, fewer plastic types, cleaner streams, higher-quality material. The less assorted plastic soup we manufacture in the first place, the greater the chance of making the same thing again.

So yes, it’s only a yoghurt pot. But it’s a really good one.

Told you it was exciting. (Don’t look at me like that.)

♻️ A quick reminder about 16th-century document recycling.Please DO NOT put parchment in your green bin. It isn't paper....
07/10/2026

♻️ A quick reminder about 16th-century document recycling.

Please DO NOT put parchment in your green bin. It isn't paper. It's animal skin.

Historically, parchment was often used for legal documents, deeds, official records and other important material. If you've got any knocking about, please don't recycle it with your paper and card.

Fortunately, 16th-century PAPER is recyclable. It was typically made from linen and h**p and was commonly used for letters, notes, drafts and manuscripts.

Therefore, if you're having a clear-out this weekend and find a pile of unwanted Renaissance literary manuscripts, they can go in your green bin. We'll recycle them into newsprint.

Parchment, meanwhile, can be reused by scraping off the original writing and writing something else over it. This is called a palimpsest and is an excellent early example of the waste hierarchy in action.

We bring all this up because one of our crews recently recovered a sheaf of very old papers from a green bin. The sheets were covered in faded, elaborate handwriting and appeared to be drafts of poems by an unknown author.

Sadly, centuries of deterioration had left them unreadable.

All except one…

🪶
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s bin?
Thou art more lovely than recyclate:
Dustcarts do tip the contents held within,
From all the houses here on our estate.
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven burns,
But never does recycling putrefy;
And smell’th fresh the bin when it returns
For everything that it contained was dry.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose obsession with that stuff thou throw’st;
Nor shall you yet collaps’th in the shade,
When in comprehending waste advice thou grow’st:
So long as bins go out that eyes can see,
So long lives waste, which gives purpose to thee.

I once knew someone who had an extraordinary collection of shower gels.He had them lined up along the edge of the bath l...
05/10/2026

I once knew someone who had an extraordinary collection of shower gels.

He had them lined up along the edge of the bath like spirits behind a bar. Different colours, different fragrances, different promises involving things like sea minerals and alpine forests.

I think he fancied himself as a bit of a mixologist.

“I'll have two parts Euphoric Eucalyptus, one part Opulent Orchard, and a dash of Conscientious Coconut. Shaken, not stirred.”

But, for all his impressive devotion to collecting spiritually restorative shower gels, he had room, apparently, for only one bathroom bin.

In it went not only the hitherto revered containers of his exfoliating elixirs, but soiled cotton wool, cotton buds, any toilet paper he’d blown his nose into, empty toilet roll tubes, and everything else.

This is a problem so many of us share – even those of us without a rack of shower gel optics. We use the same bin for the empty shampoo bottle as we do for stuff we don’t want to ferret about in to retrieve that bottle for recycling.

As a result, the bathroom is a bit of a Bermuda Triangle for recycling. No-one sees the empty shampoo bottle leave.

Or the roll-on deodorant. Or the face cream tube. Or the bleach bottle.

All are recyclable.

So too are face cream tubes, empty air-freshener aerosols, empty toothpaste tubes, cleaning product bottles.

I don't think people necessarily make a conscious decision to throw these things away. I suspect the bathroom bin simply has a certain gravitational pull. You're standing there holding an empty bottle. The bin is two feet away. The recycling is downstairs. The bin wins. And by the time it’s full, it isn’t necessarily something you really want to sort through.

So have two. Two small bins – one for recycling and one for rubbish.

And if you're worried about finding space for it, consider: besides the above, we can usually accommodate spare toilet rolls, a toilet brush, a plunger, cleaning sponges, and at least seven bottles each containing approximately 4ml of disinfectant.

Some people have enough shower gels to operate a licensed premises.

We can probably squeeze in a little recycling basket.

Generally speaking, recycling is very easy.Most recyclable items are as obviously recyclable as the toast you’ve just to...
02/10/2026

Generally speaking, recycling is very easy.

Most recyclable items are as obviously recyclable as the toast you’ve just toasted for your breakfast is obviously edible.

Yes, there are things to trip you up - soap pumps, crinkly bags, packaging apparently constructed from several different materials not found on Earth and bonded together by aliens before being beamed into supermarkets just to confuse you.

But most of it is, dare I say it, screamingly obvious.

Plastic bottles. Tins and cans. Paper and card. These aren't among the more cryptic clues when it comes to solving the puzzle of which bin to use.

So why do so many of these things still end up in black bins?

Now, mushrooms - foraging for mushrooms is tricky.

Some are delicious. Some will make you very ill. Others apparently allow you to understand freeform jazz. Identifying which is which requires expertise, experience and, ideally, a willingness NOT to learn through trial and error. You will likely need to consult a chap who forages professionally and owns an array of vintage wicker baskets.

An empty baked-bean tin does not present such problems. Nor an empty plastic milk bottle. Nor a cereal box. You don't need to examine them for particular markings. You don't even need to consult me, let alone buy a compendium called "Recycling: the Mushroom Picker's Guide."

It's just…obvious.

And yet we still find these obviously recyclable things in the black bins of people who struggle to contain their rubbish despite insisting they "recycle everything".

Well, if I filled my fridge with toilet rolls, there would be nowhere for my milk.

Then there's: “But you only empty my black bin every fortnight.”

We do. But we collect your waste every week: black bin one week, recycling the next, and food waste weekly.

Separate it properly and suddenly the black bin doesn’t look like a wardrobe packed with the contents of the garden shed.

Recycling will always have its awkward bits. If you're unsure, check with me. But for the most part, it’s about as obvious as which end of the umbrella to hold in a rainstorm.

So let’s be honest: chucking everything in the black bin isn't being confused; it's just not recycling.

What actually is a carbon footprint?You would be forgiven for believing that your CARBON footprint is a measurement of h...
30/09/2026

What actually is a carbon footprint?

You would be forgiven for believing that your CARBON footprint is a measurement of how much CARBON dioxide you produce by what you do.

But it isn't. Or rather, it is, but also it isn't.

Welcome to carbon footprints. They aren’t just about CO₂.

They’re better thought of as the climate impact of an activity, product, person or organisation, expressed as an EQUIVALENT amount of carbon dioxide.

Because, despite the name, a carbon footprint can include multiple greenhouse gases.

To make meaningful comparisons, these gases are usually converted into carbon dioxide equivalent, written as CO₂e.

There’s methane, nitrous oxide and various fluorinated gases with names that sound like things for which you'd be prescribed peptic acid and told to contact 111 unless things improved within 24 hours.

They don't all behave in the same way either.

Some greenhouse gases trap considerably more heat than carbon dioxide. Some remain in the atmosphere for different lengths of time. Some are emitted in much smaller quantities.

And emissions can happen at different stages of a product's life. Some processes create emissions while avoiding others elsewhere.

So, when somebody tells you that something has a carbon footprint of X kilograms, they haven't actually weighed a cloud of carbon dioxide. They've tried to boil a complicated collection of greenhouse-gas impacts down into one comparable number.

And that number depends enormously on where you draw the line around the calculation, which is where lifecycle thinking comes in. A carbon footprint can account for emissions produced before, during and after whatever activity you’re looking at.

Think of it as the environmental bar tab accumulated over an evening.

Extraction is there early. Transport joins them. Manufacturing arrives and gets a round in. More transport buddies turn up. Suddenly everyone realises energy use has been quietly drinking with them all evening. Waste appears at some point, claiming it’s only staying for one.

The problem is, they aren’t all drinking the same thing.

A few slow pints of CO₂. Some shots of methane. Nitrous oxide on the cocktail menu. By the close of play, you’ve got a collection of different glasses on the table telling the story of the night.

That's essentially what CO₂e does. It converts the climate effect of different greenhouse gases into a common measure so we can compare them.

Imagine buying a new washing machine.

Could we measure the electricity it uses in your house and call that its carbon footprint?

No. Not on its own.

Somebody had to mine and process the metals. Transport them. Manufacture and ship the components. Make the plastics. Ship them. Assemble the machine. Package it. Transport it. Store it. Sell it. Deliver it.

Then you use it.

Eventually, you get rid of it.

Then someone collects it, transports it again, dismantles or processes it and, hopefully, recovers some of those materials.

You can’t judge the carbon footprint of your washing machine simply by tutting at your smart meter. You need to consider the impacts across its lifecycle.

Similarly, something doesn’t suddenly acquire a carbon footprint the moment it’s thrown away. That's one reason recovering materials, aka recycling, is so important.

If materials can be recovered and used again, we're squeezing more usefulness from resources we've already spent energy extracting, processing and transporting.

And none of this happens by magic. Recycling uses energy. Collection vehicles use fuel or electricity. Treatment facilities use energy. The whole system requires infrastructure.

But here’s the good news: recycling can avoid the emissions associated with extracting and processing virgin raw materials, and for many materials this produces substantial carbon savings.

So, what is your carbon footprint?

It’s the greenhouse-gas impact associated with everything you buy and do.

Turn on the television. Drive to the shops. Wash your clothes. Fly to Spain. Buy a cookie cutter manufactured on the other side of the planet and delivered to your front door in a cardboard box large enough to store your convertible runabout for the winter. Go for a drink.

The bar tab adds up quickly. By closing time, everyone’s counting the cost, in more ways than one.

The average bathroom now contains more dispensing technology than an agricultural expo at the NEC.You’ve got shampoo bot...
29/09/2026

The average bathroom now contains more dispensing technology than an agricultural expo at the NEC.

You’ve got shampoo bottles, bleach bottles, toilet cleaners that resemble a large wading bird mid-sneeze, soap dispensers, shower cleaning sprays that appear to have been fitted with a crossbow.

It’s those last two I want to focus on: pumps and sprays.

The bottles themselves aren’t a problem. It’s the machinery bolted to the top that causes confusion.

Pumps are ideal for soap, shampoo, and other liquids with roughly the consistency of custard. Unfortunately, inside that innocent-looking plastic head is a small mechanical conspiracy of different materials that renders the contraption about as recyclable as a Swiss watch entombed in a garden gnome.

So, when you recycle the empty bottle, take the pump off and drop that bit in the rubbish bin.

Trigger sprays, meanwhile, are designed for thinner liquids that need distributing liberally across a surface, shower screen, or that dark forgotten world behind the toilet.

Despite being considerably more complicated-looking than a pump, trigger sprays can stay on. They are made entirely of plastic.

I know – it all seems a bit backwards. The elegant, gentle pump comes off while the contraption with enough moving parts to launch a bar of soap across the house stays on.

But there it is.

Pumps off. Triggers on.

A big brand announces: “We’ve switched to greener packaging!” 🌱What’s your honest first reaction?A. The Believer 😍“It sa...
28/09/2026

A big brand announces: “We’ve switched to greener packaging!” 🌱

What’s your honest first reaction?

A. The Believer 😍
“It says ‘greener’ on the packet. Good enough for me. Well done to all involved!”

B. The Plastic Absolutist 🎉
“It’s not plastic! Brilliant! That means it’s good for the environment.”

C. The Pragmatist 🙂
“It’s a step in the right direction. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be better.”

D. The Detective 🧐
“‘Greener’, you say? Interesting. Greener how? Compared with what? Show me your workings.”

E. The Fundamentalist 🛒
“Are we seriously arguing about what to make billions of disposable packets from rather than why we’re making billions of disposable packets?”

F. The Cynic 🙄
“How incredibly fortunate that saving the planet and protecting the brand have, once again, turned out to be exactly the same thing.”

G. The Bewildered 🤯
“So... Paper good. Plastic bad. Unless paper bad. Compostable good. Unless you can’t compost it. Recyclable good. SOMEBODY JUST TELL ME WHAT TO BUY.”

H. The Nihilist 🥱
“Whatever. We’re all doomed.”

Which one are you? A–H in the comments.

And yes, you can pick more than one. I suspect most of us are several of these before breakfast.

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