Stamp it! - Recycle now

FOOD WASTE

The best thing that can happen to food is that it makes it to our plates and is enjoyed. 

Avoiding throwing out food that could have been eaten will save you money and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

However some food waste is inevitable. Egg shells, banana skins and tea bags are never going to be on the menu. 

Home composting is a great way to stop this sort of waste ending up in landfill, and our gardens will really thank us for it. See our Home Composting website for all you need to know about home composting. If you live in an area that has a local food waste recycling collection service, you can use this to dispose of anything you can’t eat, or compost at home. It can be recycled into a good quality soil improver or fertiliser and even generate electricity that can be fed back into the national grid.

• Around 7.2 million tonnes of food is thrown away by households in the UK every year, and most of it could have been eaten.
• Little by little all this waste adds up, over a year the average family throws away around £680 of food shopping – equivalent to an annual utility bill.
• Some of the waste is made up of things like peelings, cores and bones, but the majority is, or once was, perfectly good food.
• Most of it ends up in landfill sites where it rots and releases methane, a damaging green house gas. Throwing away food is also a huge waste of the energy, water and packaging used in its production, transportation and storage. If we all stopped wasting the food which could have been eaten, it would have the same CO2 impact as taking 1 in 5 cars off UK roads.

GARDEN WASTE 

When garden waste is recycled it is transformed into nutrient rich soil conditioner. This can then be used in a range of different applications, such as for agriculture, for land reclamation and as an ingredient in some multipurpose composts you can buy at a garden centre.

Most types of garden waste can be recycled, including bark, flowers, grass and hedge cuttings, leaves, plants, small branches, twigs and weeds.  If you are unable to compost at home, you can take it to your local garden waste recycling point or put it into your garden waste collection scheme, if you have one, where it will then be taken to a central composting facility to be processed. Check with your council to see if you can recycle garden waste locally!

• Garden waste makes up 14% of the average household bin (WRAP, 2002).
• Around 95% of local councils collect garden waste.
• Adding compost to soil increases the nutrients and improves the soil’s
• 
  
• Compost can be applied in a range of end uses, within gardens, on brownfield sites, landscaping and full scale agriculture
• It can be used as soil improver, mulch, topsoil constituent, turf dressing, and growing medium constituent, turf dressing, and structure to help plants grow.

Many of the food and drink products we buy are packaged in cans made from either aluminium or steel and both of these materials can be recycled after we have finished with them to make either new cans or other products.   

CANS

Did you know?

Recycling aluminium uses only around five per cent of the energy and emissions needed to make it from the raw material bauxite.  The metal can be recycled time and time again without loss of properties, so getting the aluminium recycling habit is one of the best things we can do for the environment.

Steel can also be recycled time and time again without loss of quality; by simply recycling our steel cans we can conserve non-renewable fossil fuels, reduce the consumption of energy and the emission of gasses like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Aluminium cans are:

• Shredded, removing any coloured coating
• Melted in a huge furnace
• The molten metal is poured into ingot casts to set.   Each ingot can be made into around 1.5m cans

NB: Aluminium foil is a different alloy and is usually recycled separately with other aluminium scraps to make cast items such as engine components, where it makes a big contribution to making vehicles lighter and more energy efficient.

Steel cans are:

• Put into the furnace where molten iron is added
• Oxygen is then blasted into the furnace which heats up to around 1700 degrees centigrade
• The liquid metal is poured into a mould to form big slabs which are then rolled into coils
• These coils are used to make all sorts of steel products such as bikes, cars, bridges, paperclips or even new food and drink cans.

Aluminium drinks cans are usually recycled into ingots at a special 'closed-loop' plant in Warrington.  This is the ultimate recycling process for environmental efficiency and used cans are often recycled, made into new cans, filled and put back on the shelf in just six weeks.

Foil and other aluminium is generally recycled with other aluminium scraps such as window frames and road signs, and cast into engine components for vehicles, which makes them lighter and more fuel efficient.

Recycled steel can be found in incredibly diverse variety of products including:

• Bicycle frames
• Pipes
• Train tracks
• Ship hulls
• Cars
• Bridges
• Paperclips
• Food and drinks cans

Steel can be infinitely recycled and because it is such a widely used material, the ranges of possible uses for it are endless.

CARTONS

Many beverage cartons are recyclable,  They are made from paper and lined with either plastic or for longer-life products, aluminium. The collection process for cartons varies between areas.  Some councils collect cartons for recycling as part of the recycling collection service; however cartons are more usually collected at recycling centres.

• As a nation we use 57k tonnes of cartons every year – that is the same weight of 331 blue whales.
• 86% of local authorities now collect cartons for recycling and one in four do so in kerbside collections.
• Cartons are made with between 70% and 90% paperboard, a renewable natural product and much of the carton can be reclaimed in the recycling process.

The paper recycled from the cartons can be turned into:

• Envelopes
• Plasterboard

ELECTRICITY

Overview

The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Regulations came into force in January 2007 and aim to reduce the amount of this waste going to landfill and improve recovery and recycling rates.

Electrical and electronic waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the UK. Around 1 million tonnes are generated every year.

So what items are included?

Items such as kitchen appliances, mobile phones, computers, TV’s, electrical and electronic tools can all be either recycled or reused.

Did you know?

• On average, each person in the UK buys three new electrical
  items each year or 173 million nationally.
• For every 7kg of small electricals bought last year - the average amount per person - only a fraction (1.3kg) was sent to be recycled
• There’s no need to bin items – you can drop them off at your local recycling centre. Recycle Now has a handy postcode locator to find your nearest recycling centre that accepts waste electricals.
• Recycling electricals is environmentally friendly – unwanted electricals and electronics can be recycled and contain really valuable raw materials. For example, one iron contains enough steel to produce 13 steel cans.
• Some retailers offer free recycling schemes or take back options. Ask your local retailer for more information.

Electrical items contain many different parts which, once recycled, can be used again in a variety of new applications. Below are examples of what some of the recycled parts may become:

Hover mowers contain:

• Strong ABS plastic that can be used for light, rigid, molded products such as musical instruments, cases, pipe fittings and car bumpers
• Copper motors that can be turned into copper pipe, coins in some currencies, jewellery, wire and as winding wire for motors in new electronic products (fridges, vacuums, tools, toys, motors etc. etc.) Copper can be mixed with zinc to make brass, or with tin to make bronze.

Games consoles contain:

• Steel that can be used for computer casings, car parts and beams
• Circuit boards, which have a range of precious metals including gold, silver, platinum and palladium; platinum and palladium are used in catalytic convertors and mobile phones…and jewellery

Mobile phones contain:

• Precious metals (like gold, platinum and palladium), a variety of which can be recycled into component plating and low voltage electrical contacts; palladium plays a key role in the technology used for fuel cells.
• Zinc which is used to galvanise steel; it can also be mixed with copper to make brass. Ships and submarines use zinc blocks to stop rust forming.

GLASS

Domestic waste glass (known as cullet) is easy to recycle. The UK currently recycles around 50% of container glass (like bottles and jars) and whilst this figure has doubled over the last five years it still lags behind other countries i.e. both Switzerland and Finland recycle more than 90% of their glass.

Glass is usually collected in 'bottle banks' at recycling centres or as part of our kerbside collection.  However there is still more we can all do, such as remembering to recycle our clear jars (pasta sauce jars and jam jars) which are often forgotten.

The UK business sector still has a lot of work to do to recycle glass – bars, restaurants and pubs currently throw away 600,000 tonnes of glass every year, with most of it ending up in landfill. 

Did you know?

Recycling two bottles saves enough energy to boil enough water for five cups of tea!

Recycled glass can be used to make a wide range of everyday products and some that are completely unexpected, including:

• New bottles and jars
• ‘Processed sand’ – finely ground glass used in golf course bunkers
• ‘Glassphalt’ for road surfacing

The different types of glass

We use many different types of glass in the UK, but at home we mostly use ‘soda-lime-silica’ glass for containers like bottles and jars. It is important not to mix up the different types of glass as they are re-processed differently.

Different types of glass include:

• Borosilicate glass – used for heat-resistant cooking equipment like Pyrex
• Lead glass – for sparkling decorative glassware
• Glass fibre –for insulation and fibre optic cable

These different types of glass are not widely recycled so do not add these into your kerbside collection container or bottle banks at the recycling centre.

Colour and quality

During the glass manufacturing process, extra raw materials can be added to give the glass a particular colour or special qualities.

The extra raw materials that can be added are:

• Iron for a brown or green colour
• Cobalt for blue
• Alumina for durability
• Boron to improve resistance to heat or cold

PAPER

We use paper every day and as a nation 12.5 million tonnes is used each year. 

• It takes 7 days for a recycled newspaper to come back as a newspaper again.
• 67% of the paper and cardboard used in the UK is recovered for recycling
• 11 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions were avoided by recycling paper and board in 2008, the equivalent of taking around 3½ million cars off the road.

Each time paper is recycled, the fibres get shorter so unlike other materials it cannot be recycled forever.  However, the fibres that can no longer be used are separated by the mill and then either used for energy generation, soil conditioner or sent to landfill.

We can make several uses of the fibres before they are no longer suitable for recycling.  Below are some examples of recycled paper.

• All of the newsprint manufactured here in the UK is now made from 100% recycled paper;
• UK tissue mills use around half million tonnes per year of high grade recycled paper;
• Corrugated packaging material consists nearly of 100% recycled material.

PLASTIC BOTTLES

Plastic is one of the most popular and useful materials of modern times.  However, its popularity is part of the problem: we now use about 20 times more plastic than we did 50 years ago.  However, we can optimise the lifespan of plastics by reusing and recycling items as many times as possible.  

Did you know? 

92% of all UK local authorities now offer collection facilities for plastic bottles either from your kerbside collection scheme or at recycling centres. 

What about other plastics?

A recent study demonstated mixed plastics packaging (trays, tubs, pots, films etc) can be mechanically recycled and is both economically and environmentally effective to do so.  Further work is being conducted in this area and it is hoped that the UK will have comprehensive infrastructure for the collection, sorting and reprocessing of these valuable resources in the UK in the near future.

You can check the postcode locator to find out which plastics your local authority collects.

Plastics are:-

• sorted
• shredded
• washed
• melted
• pelletised

It is a two-stage process:

• Sorting is mainly done automatically with a manual polish
• Plastic is either melted down directly and moulded into a new shape, or shredded into flakes then melted down before being processed into granulates

The American Society of Plastics Industry developed a standard marking code to help consumers identify and sort the main types of plastic.

The main types of plastics are:

	Polyethylene terephthalate - Fizzy drink bottles and oven-ready meal trays
	High-density polyethylene - Bottles for milk and washing-up liquids.
	Polyvinyl chloride - Food trays, cling film, bottles for squash, mineral water and shampoo
	Low density polyethylene - Carrier bags and bin liners.
	Polypropylene - Margarine tubs, microwaveable meal trays.
	Polystyrene - Yoghurt pots, foam meat or fish trays, hamburger boxes and egg cartons, vending cups, plastic cutlery, protective packaging for electronic goods and toys
	Any other plastics that do not fall into any of the above categories.  An example is melamine, which is often used in plastic plates and cups.

If you look on the plastics products you buy, you should spot the little symbol.

Degradable plastics - These are oil based and either eventually break down or disperse in to smaller fragments. These may then potentially biodegrade or break down further to reduce the material to water, CO2, biomass (plant matter) and trace elements.

Biodegradable plastics - These should break down cleanly, in a defined time period, to form simple molecules found in the environment such as carbon dioxide and water.

The predominant mechanism which decomposes biodegradable plastics is the action of micro-organisms which produces:

• carbon dioxide
• methane
• water
• inorganic compounds, or
• biomass

Compostable plastics - These are a subset of biodegradable plastics which must demonstrate that they biodegrade and disintegrate completely in a compost bin or system during the 3-4 months composting process.  It refers to 'industrial composting' where the compost reaches higher temperatures than home composting .

Disposal of degradable and biodegradable plastics - These plastics will not degrade effectively in a landfill site and could potentially hinder the quality of recycled plastic if they enter a conventional plastics recycling system.

There is a wide range of products made from recycled plastic, including:-

• polyethylene bin liners and carrier bags
• plastic bottles
• flooring and window frames
• building insulation board
• video and compact disc cassette cases
• fencing and garden furniture
• water butts, garden sheds and composters
• seed trays
• fleeces
• fibre filling for sleeping bags and duvets
• variety of office accessories

http://www.recyclenow.com/how_is_it_recycled/food_waste.html