Chances are you’ve been recycling glass, tins and newspapers for some time now but may still find that your family generates a huge amount of rubbish each week. If you’re feeling frustrated about the amount of waste you’re sending to landfill then it might be time to supercharge your recycling.
If you’re constantly looking for new ways to recycle your waste, you’re not alone. In fact ‘extreme recycling’ – where people aim to recycle as much as possible from their household waste is becoming something of an obsession for some. For example, Birmingham-based John Newson, who the media has termed an ‘extreme recycler’, manages to recycle almost every scrap of household waste, leaving him with just one bin bag of unrecyclable material for an entire year.
So if you want to step up your recycling efforts, where do you start? Here are some ideas:
- Local authority recycling centres now recycle a wide range of materials so check your local tip’s recycling policy and take what you can here.
- Invest in a composter to deal with everyday kitchen waste such as fruit and vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, teabags and egg shells.
- When shopping for household products, choose those with the least packaging. Not only will this leave you with less waste to dispose of but hopefully if we all start choosing products with little or no packaging, manufacturers will find new ways to cut their packaging.
- Look out for local collection points for items such as old batteries, ink cartridges and even spectacles and shoes. Old clothes that are still in good condition can of course be taken to local charity shops but ripped or stained fabrics can also be recycled at a textile recycling point.
For more information on recycling, visit: http://www.wrap.org.uk/category/subject/recycling
