How to Recycle Properly

It is important for people to understand what items can and cannot be recycled.
Just about every type of plastic and item can be recycled. But many things cost so much to recycle that it is not cost effective to do so. It is always best to try and reuse or repurpose items before seeing if they can be recycled, and then recycling the things that effectively can.

It is a sad fact that since supermarkets stopped selling single use plastic bags, and replaced them with ‘bags for life’ that it is reported that families buy over 50 bags for life a year, which is obviously ridiculously bad for the environment.

In the UK we are really bad at recycling. Much of our waste is sent to landfill or incinerated. In the Swedish city of Eskilstuna nothing is sent to landfill. They have created a simple system where families clean, dry and sort their recycling. Organising items into different coloured bags (metal, food, newspapers, textiles, plastic, cartons). Things that can’t be recycled like used tissues and nappies go in a white bag. The coloured bags are then machine sorted and sent for recycling, food waste is processed into slurry to make biogas which is used to power the city’s buses. Anything that can’t be recycled gets incinerated and used for energy.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business-47880558

In the UK where we don’t use a colour bag system, everything gets put together in our recycling bins for sorting later, which seems like a crazy way of doing things!

Regardless it is important that we still try our best to recycle properly within our current system (whilst still trying to put pressure on our councils to use a better system like coloured bags).

Check the labels, then rinse and dry items, leaving lids on bottles and tins, and not crushing the items (many are identified by shape. A huge problem we have in the UK problem is ‘wishcycling’ . This is where people put products into their bins that they wish could be recycled. All this does is ‘contaminate’ all the rest of the recycling, meaning that huge amounts of product has to be sent to landfill because it would take too much time and energy to to sort from the stuff that can be used.

Do a scrunch test. If it stays crumpled it can be collected for recycling; if it springs back out again, check whether your supermarket has a ‘soft plastics’ collection bin.
Please don’t crush your recycling! Facilities sort by shape.
Only recycle items bigger than a tennis ball.
Don’t recycle cardboard products heavily contaminated with food, oil, dirt or paint (like pizza in pizza boxes).
Always avoid black plastic (this in’t recyclable).
Take off the plastic film from plastic food trays.
Toothpaste tubes cannot be recycled.