Tips for recycling
Before you recycle something, first think if you or someone else could make use of it again as reusing is even better than recycling. For example, many Kent charities are pleased to receive donations of furniture and/or electrical goods; animal shelters often welcome old duvets and blankets as they make for good bedding; and listing your unwanted items on free community websites such as Freecycle or Freegle will help find a new home for them while helping other people at the same time. For a guide to organising your own freecycling or swap shop event, click here.
Another good way of reusing things – either for your own benefit or to pass them on to someone else – is to take broken items to a ‘repair café’ and have them fixed for free to save them from the bin. A list of repair cafés in Kent can be found here.
The way rubbish is collected varies across Kent, so check out your local council’s website to see what happens in your area. There is also useful information from Kent County Council here.
But these are some good tips no matter where you live:
- Rinse and drain food packaging so it doesn’t contaminate other material being recycled
- Rinse, squish and put the cap back on all plastic bottles
- Flatten cardboard boxes and packaging, and remove any tape or film
- If your local council has glass bottle banks, only put bottles, jars and glass containers (for example perfume bottles) in them. Glasses, lightbulbs and Pyrex® dishes should be dealt with separately
- Aluminium foil and aluminium takeaway dishes are easily recycled but need to be clean. For smaller pieces of foil scrunch together into a tennis ball size
- If your council doesn’t collect old clothes, they can be taken to a charity shop or put in a clothing collection bin
- It’s not just newspapers and cardboard packaging that you can recycle; envelopes, wrapping paper, birthday cards (as long as they don’t contain glitter), phone books and loo roll tubes can all be given a new lease of life
- Don’t put things like shampoo bottles in the bathroom bin but add them to your recycling
- Don’t put compostable plastics in your recycling, food waste or garden waste bin.
For a comprehensive guide to recycling, click here.
Did you know recycling one glass bottle saves enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for four hours?