Sunday 12 May 2019

5 Ways We Recycle Outside of the Council Bins


Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Those are the first rules for looking after our planet and her resources. For the things I haven't managed to reduce or re-use, I am looking for ways to recycle and these are five ways I recycle outside of the council provided bins




We use the food bin for cooked food, meat and dairy but we have our own compost bin in the kitchen and a big compost bin in the garden for fruit and veg scraps, toast crusts, used coffee, garden waste, hair I have pulled from the hairbrush and brown paper. It means there is less in our council food waste and that we have wonderfully rich compost each year for planting seeds and looking after our garden.

Terracycle operate recycling schemes for certain products and they collect them up to make them into garden furniture, water cans and other things. We collect crisp packets for one programme and they pay a small amount of money to Archie's school for each box we send in. I am in charge of collecting them up from the school and friends to send in a big box. There are other schemes including biscuit wrappers, trigger heads for cleaning sprays, babyfood pouches and more and you can check out the Terracycle website to find your local drop off.


All of our clothes get reused or recycled including those that are heavily stained. The charity shops do accept damaged clothing that they can sell as 'rags' but I also cut up the school polo shirts that are so far past useable to use as wipes around the kitchen and in the house.  All outgrown clothing is recycled or reused though and we never put any in the bins.

Did you know that anywhere that sells batteries has to accept them back? All shops that sell batteries of any kind will have somewhere you can return used ones and the shop will send them back to be recycled. This isn't just Tesco, this is your local corner shop too and some schools even have battery recycling points.

Based in Portsmouth is a company that collects milk bottle lids, breaks them down into plastic pellets and makes children's toys with them. It isn't local for everyone and I don't know if there are other companies doing this around the country but we save our milk bottle lids and pass them on to someone who visits Portsmouth and takes them with her. You can find out more here.

We are so far from perfect but we are trying to recycle wherever possible to help reduce the amount of plastic that goes in  our black bin. Next up is looking into ecobricks! Do you have any great recycling tips?


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