How To Recycle

How many times have you stood in the kitchen with packaging in your hand and agonised over whether you can recycle it or not? Hands up who just chucks it in the recycling bin anyway and hopes for the best?

It seems like we read headlines on plastic pollution and global warming almost every day. We might think we’re doing our bit by recycling, and while you might religiously rinse out and recycle your tins of beans and your plastic bottles, what about the products you use in your bathroom?

It’s not Easter if you don’t feast on a chocolate egg or three. The first chocolate Easter eggs in Britain were introduced by Fry’s in 1873, and now they make up around 10% of our annual spending on chocolate. Just incase you were wondering, we munch our way through about 80 million chocolate eggs every year. Not great for our waistlines, or for the environment.

Walkers Crisps has announced that over 500,000 empty crisp packets have been sent back to the company for recycling in the 3 months since they launched the UK’s first crisp packet recycling scheme.

Protecting the environment is everyone’s business, and even though we might pat ourselves on the back for religiously rinsing our cans of beans and putting them in the recycling, it appears that kids are head and shoulders above us when it comes to recycling knowledge.

Things can get confusing when it comes to recycling. Can you recycle yoghurt pots, pizza boxes, and foil? Should you put the lids on jars and bottles when you put them in the recycling? Well when it comes to plastic bottles, the answer is yes.

KP snacks are the latest company to launch a recycling scheme for their packaging, they have joined up with Terracycle for the collection of nuts, crisps, popcorn and pretzel packets which will then be collected and turned into new items like garden furniture.

Hovis has joined forces with TerraCycle to launch a bread recycling scheme, only 1 in ten local authorities recycle bread bags so you can see why consumers who want to do the right thing have such a problem.  

Tetra Pak and Veolia have joined forces to make sure that all parts of the used drinks cartons in the EU can be recycled by the year 2025, the recycling director at Tetra Pak said that every material in these cartons can be recycled .  

When it comes to recycling, contact lenses may not be high up on the list, but with millions of people in the UK wearing contact lenses this equates to a lof of plastic waste.  Valli Opticians has introduced a contact lens recycling scheme across their 14 practices, the lenses are collected and then sent to TerraCycle who sort them into different materials.