What is Recycle Week?
Recycle week is an annual event formed by the organisation WRAP. It is now in its 15th year with this year’s being held on the week of 24th-30th September 2018.
Aim
The aim of Recycle Week is to encourage the public to recycle more and promote the benefits of recycling items from all around the home.
This year’s theme is ‘Recycling. We do. Because it matters.’ The main focus will be on plastic.
With programmes like Blue Planet II bringing awareness to the public about the consequences of plastic pollution to the environment and wildlife people are more willing than ever to help the cause.
For more information on plastic pollution and what you can do to help please visit our blog ‘Haulaway are talking about plastic and what you can do!’ In the meantime we have provided a couple of extra tips to help with your home recycling:
Keep plastic bags separate
There is a reason shops now charge for plastic bags. They’re a real problem for our wildlife and environment. And while you may think that you’re helping out by bagging up all of your recyclables and popping the bag into the recycling bin, this actually means that it will need manually sorting back at the recycling depot to remove the plastic bags. This makes the process far more time consuming and less efficient. It is best to store them up and recycle them separately. Many supermarkets now have carrier bag collection points.
Bottles – lids on or lids off?
Going back a few years it was always requested for lids to be removed from plastic bottles before placing into the recycling bin. This was because the lids are made from polypropylene which melted at a higher temperature than the rest of the bottle. Also if the bottles hadn’t been compressed the lids tended to fly off at high speeds which were actually quite dangerous! Fortunately, the recycling process has since improved and it is now ok to keep the lids on. Keeping them on means they are less likely to be missed in the screening process and end up in with general waste. Advice is to squash bottles down so they don’t contain any air or water and then replace the lids back on.
Wash your recyclables
Recyclables need to be clean and free of food contamination for them to actually be recyclable! Items such as bottles, yoghurt pots and margarine tubs all need washing out to remove any food or liquid that has remained. Unfortunately, when recyclables haven’t been cleaned there is a risk they will contaminate the rest of the items in the bin, or worse still, the whole load on the dustcart!
Of course, if you have larger items to dispose of, such as from a house clearance, you can rest assured that any skips hired through Haulaway will return to our waste transfer station where they are manually sorted into their individual waste grades ready for recycling.
