Our last post was all about recycling and we’ve had some feedback that a bit more detail was needed. We therefore decided to do a mini update post to give you some recycling tips that fit in with some of the ideas we wrote about last week.
Plastic Bag Recycling
In our recycling post we wrote about the fact you could bring plastic bags and other soft plastic to supermarkets to recycle. The easiest way to know if a plastic bag can be sent back to the supermarket is to look for a notice on the bag saying so. The icon will look similar to the images shown below:
The Crinkle Test
Even if it doesn’t say that the plastic can be recycled, the other test is the crinkle test. Scrunch the plastic in your hand – if it crinkles bin it, if it doesn’t, recycle it. An example would be the film on top of a box of grapes. If you scrunch the plastic it crinkles, so you must put it to landfill. However, if you scrunch the plastic your toilet rolls come wrapped in, it doesn’t crinkle, so you should recycle it with your plastic bags.
Terracycle
On to Terracycle. Something we didn’t make clear in our recycling post was that the Terracycle website has maps for each of the recycling schemes it operates. To make it easy for you all, we’ve listed the most common UK maps below:
- Ella’s Kitchen packaging recycling points
- Contact lens recycling points (any brand)
- Cleaning product recycling points option 1 or option 2 (check Terracycle pages for option 1 and option 2 for what’s accepted)
- Toothbrush & toothpaste tube recycling points (any brand)
- Sweet wrapper recycling points (any brand)
- Crisp packet recycling points option 1 or option 2 (any brand)
- Beauty product packaging recycling points (check Terracycle page for what’s accepted)
- Pet food pouches recycling points (any brand)
- Biscuit and cake wrapper recycling points (any brand)
- Pen recycling points (any brand)
Apologies if you live outside the UK, but you’ll have to find you Terracycle maps yourself – there’s only so much we can do!
There are some additional recycling points that we’ve not listed above, which were more brand-specific. Please check out the Terracycle website if there’s something you else you want to recycle, such as Pringles (although really you should ask yourself if Pringles really taste of anything other than cardboard…).
The Final Recycling Tip
We wanted to add one final recycling tip. Well, two. Check out your local recycling centre (this is the posh word for what we in the 80s called a tip) – they take a whole lot of stuff to be recycled. The second point is, if you think something should be recycled but isn’t, email your council and/or your MP. Use your voter power and get things changed!
That’s it for this post. It’s a short one, but we wanted to ensure that following on from our recycling post we gave you some recycling tips to ensure you Go Beyond the Recycling Bin.
An extra thought about recycling of a common piece of kit – printer ink cartridges. We can take them to our recycling enterprise (the tip!) or to some supermarkets, but they are not collected from our kerbside (surprise, surprise!). But – and I should say that I am not paid a commission – I have signed up to HP Ink. Of course this only applies (well I think it does) to HP so you need an HP printer but for a monthly DDR the size of which depends on your paper usage (do you need to print at all and if so what’s the most ecologically friendly paper to use? Answers please!) they send you replacement cartridges along with an envelope (plastic ☹️☹️) to send them back for recycling. How do you work out which is the most environmentally friendly option? From an economic point of view it has certainly saved money (significantly so) but is it necessarily the best option? Oh, and a final thought. The replacement cartridges that they send were made in Malaysia!
Help please!