Recycling

I am very big on recycling. When I moved into my flat, one of the first things I did was to apply for a recycling bin. Although we live in Brent, whose slogan is 'Creating a cleaner, greener Brent', they said no, because we live in a flat and so there's nowhere to put it. I emailed back a few times to say we had an empty shop underneath so on recycling days I could leave it in the shop doorway which is off the pavement, but got no reply. How rude.


In Bristol, recycling has been a big thing for a while, and we even have brown bins for food waste only. The idea is to reduce your waste so that the main bin only needs collecting once a fortnight. I think we were pretty special to have 3 bins, but then saw this article today on the BBC news website about some areas having 9 bins!! That just seems scary and like it would put people off.

None of my housemates ever seem quite as keen as me to recycle. I think they like the idea of it as long as they don't actually have to do anything. When we lived in Portsmouth, they gave us green wheelie bins and everything recyclable went in here, apart from glass as that could get a bit messy. So we collected up all the glass in a separate tub and every so often would take it to the bottle bank. We did this so regularly that one of my housemates was genuinely surprised when at the end of the year she discovered that the bin men didn't actually take glass! She hadn't realised that we'd been doing it all along.

My housemates now in London are also equally happy to put things in plastic bags on the back of the kitchen door...but less happy to walk down the road to the recycling bins. I've tried to see what happens if I don't take them...but it just means that your can't really open the kitchen door any more and so it's just easiest if I go.

When I was younger, me and my sister used to fight over who got to smash the glass bottles when we went recycling with Mum. Maybe that's why I enjoy it so much, because it's almost a game to me. I grew up feeling really chuffed when I got to smash more bottles than Chloe. 

On Sunday, one of my housemates said 'Is there even any point in recycling anyway as most of it ends up in landfills in China?'. Whilst it is true that I had heard that this had happened in the past, I just don't physically think that I can throw a glass jar or a tin can in the normal bin.

So I decided to investigate....

According to recyclenow.com, a lot of our recycled waste is processed here in the UK and reused to make new items. 

Information collected for Defra by the Environment Agency on packaging waste shows how much material is exported and how much is recycled in the UK:

Material	Reprocessed in the UK	Reprocessed Abroad
Paper	49%	51%
Glass	81%	19%
Aluminium	66%	34%
Plastic	33%	67%
Wood	100%	0%

The CPI figures, which include newsprint, indicate a balance of about 47% domestic reprocessing and 53% export.

So even though a lot of our waste is sent abroad to be processed, for example to China, this is still better than throwing it into a landfill site, and China has a big need for raw materials such as plastic as it does not have any of its own oil reserves. Also, transportation costs are extremely cheap, as they are already coming to the UK with goods to export, and so would otherwise be returning partially empty. 

So that makes me feel slightly happier...and hopefully might encourage other people too!