Pesticides / Herbicides

In short

Pesticides and herbicides never go in any bin and never down any drain. They are household hazardous waste and need a proper drop-off, which most councils and some transfer stations provide. Keep the product in its original labelled container until you hand it over — the label is what tells the people handling it what they are dealing with.

What it's made of

What something is made from is what decides where it can go — this is usually the reason an item can't be recycled.

• An active ingredient, usually a small percentage of the product.
• Solvents, surfactants and carriers that make up most of the volume and are often hazardous in their own right.
• An HDPE plastic or metal container, sometimes with a measuring cap.

Before you get rid of it

1. Leave the product in its original container. Never decant garden chemicals into a drink bottle or an unlabelled jar — this is a genuine poisoning risk, particularly with children in the house.
2. Do not mix different products together. Some combinations react, and a mixture is much harder for a hazardous waste facility to deal with.
3. Keep the label intact and readable. If the label is gone, say so when you drop it off rather than guessing at what it is.
4. Store it upright, out of direct sun and out of reach of children and pets until you can take it in.
5. Contact your council or a household hazardous waste service to find out where and when they accept it.

Common mistakes

• Pouring leftover product down the drain, onto the ground or into a gully trap. It reaches waterways, and these products are designed to kill living things.
• Putting containers in the rubbish or recycling. They injure collection workers, and the residue leaks.
• Mixing leftovers together to save space, which can cause a reaction and makes safe disposal much harder.
• Buying a large container to save money and then storing the remainder for years. Concentrates degrade, and you end up with a disposal problem instead of a saving.

Better than binning it

• If the product is still usable and in date, someone else may well want it — a neighbour, a community garden or a local gardening group. Passing on a usable product is far better than disposing of it.
• Buy the smallest quantity that does the job. The cheapest disposal is the product you never bought.
• Some agrichemical container take-back schemes accept properly rinsed containers from participating brands. Check whether your product and your location qualify before relying on it.

What happens to it

Collected household hazardous waste is sorted by chemical type and then treated according to what it is — commonly high-temperature incineration, which destroys the organic molecules, or chemical neutralisation. Empty containers that have been correctly triple-rinsed can sometimes enter a plastics recycling stream through a dedicated agrichemical scheme, but an unrinsed container is treated as hazardous waste in its own right.

Questions people ask