Recycling for Dummies
March 19, 2009 by allthingsnatural
First, what a beatiful day it’s been. I had lunch whilst sitting outside in the glorious sunshine. Might even go for a run later!
So, back on the subject of recycling, which is a more complicated than I thought.
It’s not just a case of putting plastics into one recycling bin, paper into another, glass in another: oh no, only certain types of plastics can be recycled (which ones is even more confusing); some recycling centres takes paper and cardboard, some don’t. You have to wash everything out, don’t just chuck dirty cans or milk cartons away and one piece of the wrong type of material can negate a whole bin of recyling.
Have you seen these little symbols on the back of packs – American Society of Plastics Industry marking code.
Quite helpful to an extent as long as you know what PP or HDPE or PP stands for! So I emailed the local council about what can and can’t be recycle and got this (fairly) helpful reply:-
“With regards to the plastic bottles recycling skip at Summers Lane, in common with the house hold collection, we simply say anything bottle shaped this can be plastic milk bottles, drinks or detergent bottles providing they are clean.
We also have a hard plastics recycling skip at Summers Lane. It is best to check with staff what can go in here when you get there as it is quite complicated and the rules keep changing due to the requirements of our re-processor. However the below is a rough rule of thumb.
We can take grades 2 (not grocery bags), 3 (not cling film), 5 and some 6 (Solid Polystyrene products only). However we can not accept any plastic that has contained food (meat and fish trays, yogurt pots, margarine containers etc). Once we take these out of the equation along with bottles which as I mentioned above have their own skip this leaves mainly grade 3 and 6. I have listed some examples of what we can take below (plastic tools can also go in although don’t know their number):
2 (HDPE): Plastic jug
3 (PVC): Pipes, fittings, window and door frames, automotive parts.
5 (PP): Bottle caps, Stationary (remove ink from pens), pill bottles
6 (PS): Kids toys, CD and video cases, disposable kitchen utensils (clean), plastic egg cartons.
I am unaware of anywhere in Barnet that can take mixed plastics for recycling but it may well be the case that one or more of the supermarkets do. As I expect you are away most supermarkets collect carrier bags for recycling”
Ok, but I’ve still got a bag full of stuff that I’m not sure can be recycled or not. More research needed methinks.
One good thing though that will help us all more in the future is the news that many of our supermarkets are going to adopt or have already adopted the British Retail Consortium recycling label which will standardise the recycling information on our packaging.
I reckon this is a great step, much clearer and will hopefully encourage many more people to recycle.
Read the full article about the BRC initiative here.
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