Recycling varies from town to town, city to city and country to country. It can be hard to know where to start, especially when moving to a new area.
First of all, you need to know what you can recycle ‘curb-side’ at home:
Not sure of the recycling policy in your area? If you are in the UK, you can search your postcode on this GOV.UK website and it will show you to your local authority page. This will tell you what bins are collected, how often and what can go in each one. This is a useful starting place.
Recycle Now is another great website to use when checking specific items to recycle in your local area too.
Recycling symbols can also be confusing so take a look here to check out what the different recycling symbols mean.
Where to start?
A good place to start is to focus on a few items only and see how you get on.
These are the easiest things to recycle:
- Milk cartons/bottles – rinse out and put the lids back on
- Cardboard boxes – Examples include: cereal boxes, parcels, envelopes – flatten and remove any sellotape
- Ready meals – split the cardboard sleeve and rinse the plastic tray. Peel and separate the film lid and throw that part in the bin.
- Water/fizzy drink bottles – rinse and put the lids back on before recycling. Squash the bottle if you can
Take a look at this video for easy steps to recycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Uf_sqN77mI&t=96s
Get the household involved!
This is one of the easiest ways to get everyone involved in recycling if you have a busy house (you could do the same at work!)! Could you put little signs above each bin to say what can and can’t go in? Motivating everyone to help makes life so much easier. Don’t forget to remind them to rinse things out first.
The key is not to stress
Make sure you don’t put extra pressure on yourself, if you don’t have time to rinse something, come back to it when you are ready. Or put all recycling into one box and sort it once a week if you prefer. Remember starting to recycle is making a positive change and you don’t need to be perfect so anything you can do is progress.
