Recycling Around the World

When the festival last took place in 2019, there was litter lying on the site for over a week. The organisers said they would introduce incentives to tackle the problem of festival litter. This year, all camping tickets included a £5 refundable ‘litter bond’. 

Festival-goers could get it back if they filled up a bin bag with litter before they left. As a result, people collected two industrial-sized skips worth of rubbish.

A local charity, Mandalay Wellbeing, also got involved, collecting discarded tents for vulnerable people.

Described by the UN Secretary-General as a “code red for humanity,”. The latest climate report released by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a sombre assessment of our planet’s future. 

Released just in time for the COP26. The UN climate change conference is set to take place in Glasgow later this year. The much-anticipated report provides a comprehensive and detailed picture of how human activity is causing climate change. Its findings make for sobering reading.

But what does it mean to us? How can we help avoid a future of extreme heatwaves, severe flooding, and devastating droughts? In this article, we’ll highlight some of the key points raised in the IPCC climate change report and explain what code red for humanity means for you.

We all know that it is important to recycle for the well-being of our planet. But did you know that you could make money out of it? Your empty cosmetics bottles, designer shoe boxes, and old mobile phones could be worth a fortune, and you could even cash in on empty cans and toilet roll tubes.

When it comes to recycling, one man’s trash really is another man’s treasure, so before you fill up your recycling bins this weekend, check out our guide below.

The current UK recycling rate is hovering around 45%. While this is not bad, we could do better. However, even the avid recyclers among you will admit that you sometimes struggle to work out what can be recycled. It turns out that you can recycle more than you think, and some of the items might surprise you. Here are 10 things you didn’t know you could recycle.

When it comes to sustainable living, some cities just lead the way. Adelaide in Australia is no exception. One of Australia’s greenest cities, it's home to 50% of South Australia’s native plant species as well as 75% of the native birds.   Because of its natural resources, Adelaide is in an area designated as a Natural Resource Management Region. Here’s how it’s become one of the world’s greenest cities.

George at ASDA has launched a clothes recycling scheme that will give customers rewards for bringing back their unwanted clothes. In partnership with Yellow Octopus Group which helps businesses become more sustainable. ASDA Northern Ireland has a scheme where customers receive a 10% off voucher which they can use online at George. Customers just have to locate a participating store then they can get a label or QR code so they can drop off their old and unwanted items. 

Discarded laughing gas canisters are becoming an increasingly familiar sight on our pavements and in our parks. These small steel bottles contain nitrous oxide or ‘laughing gas’ which has become a recreational drug of choice for party and festival-goers.

Nitrous oxide is a light anaesthetic in dentistry or to charge whipped cream aerosols. As a drug, the gas it provides is transferred from the canister into a balloon and inhaled. The high that users get is brief, so you’ll often find a large number of discarded canisters in the same place.

With more of us working from home, or just wanting to enjoy a luxurious cup of coffee whenever we fancy one, the popularity of coffee pods has surged. It’s great for the coffee companies and a treat for us, but maybe not so good for the environment, as a YouGov poll of over 4,000 coffee pod drinkers found that 35% of them didn’t know that coffee pods were recyclable. 

As being one of the most picturesque cities in central Europe, Ljubljana is one of the world's greenest cities and it even won the European Green Capital in 2016

You’re probably used to seeing depressing headlines about recycling, but what about the good things that are being done all around the world to make recycling a way of life...