Recycling Upstairs and Down is the chosen theme of Recycle Week 2015 – encouraging us to look past the kitchen when recycling around the home.
In recent years we’ve seen the recycling rate in Scotland shoot up to almost 42%, with householders across the country making recycling materials like plastic bottles, glass, paper and even food an everyday habit.
But what’s making up the remaining 58%?
Research suggests a fair chunk of it is just stuff from rooms in the house we forget to recycle in.
Studies show that we are great at recycling stuff in the kitchen, but when it comes to the rest of the house, we often forget that an empty bleach bottle is just as recyclable as an empty water bottle. So this Recycle Week, Zero Waste Scotland is calling for us to get recycling all around the house.
This means in the bathroom, recycling things like shampoo bottles, loo rolls, aerosols and the boxes toothpaste comes in; or in the bedroom, recycling the cardboard tags from new clothes and when clothes are too worn out to be re-used, recycling them as well. In the living room, you can recycle newspapers and magazines. You can see how all this stuff starts to stack up in old rubbish bin, can’t you?
As well as encouraging householders to go the extra mile to recycle around the house, Recycle Week is also a great time for organisations working to get their message out to too.
In the workplace, why not run an event for staff to increase recycling rates in your office? You could look at focusing on items you don’t currently recycle, like pens, cans, batteries, books, toner cartridges, furniture, IT equipment, mobile phones or small electrical items. Or you could run a recycling challenge – see which team is the best!
Schools are winding down for the summer holidays, so why not try running a poster competition, making your own recycled paper or recycling household items into something useful and creative for a bit of end of term educational fun? You could also run lessons on what happens to recycling once it’s collected – how plastic bottles become football shirts or food waste becomes electricity.
If you’re looking for ways to engage your local community on environmental issues, Recycle Week offers loads of opportunities for fun ways for community groups to get people rolling their sleeves up. Why not run events to get people actually recycling materials themselves? You could make your own paper, transform scrap wood into planters, make fun sculptures from old tyres – there are loads of fun ways to get involved.
Zero Waste Scotland will be adding a whole range of support materials online very soon, so check www.recycleforscotland.com for a toolkit, posters, guides, template media materials and more.