Recycle your plastic bottles

As well as recycling our stamps and turning them into something useful - funds for animal charities - you can also recycle your plastic and save it going to landfill or littering the countryside.  

I really despair at the amount of rubbish along the side of the road in Sussex - I would love to know why on earth people chuck it out of the window & can't take it home with them to put in the bin....  It looks very unsightly and worse, the wildlife often think our rubbish is a tasty treat and unknowingly tuck in, with terrible consequences for then.

Rant over, there's a new government pledge (they are always tons of them, of course) to recycle more plastic.

Enter Pledge4Plastics.  The site is asking people to recycle one plastic bottle a week.  Currently, it estimates that the average household uses 440 plastic bottles a year but only recycles 250 of them.  Many go to landfill - nearly 5 billion in 2012.  About 33 million plastic bottles are used in the UK every day. That's a lot of plastic.

Some local authorities also collect plastic pots, tubs and trays - check your local government's website to see what they will pick up.  And they'll also give you info about what you need to do to it first.  In the case of West Sussex, we've just had their Connections update which comes round (I forget how often) with what's happening, and they say that plastic bottles need to be clean, dry & loose before putting them into the bin.

Pledge4Plastics has info on how to recycle,  the recycling journey (from you putting your plastic stuff into the bin to it being turned into recycled products) and then also what sorts of things plastic can be turned into.  The products are quite amazing - chairs, more bottles and toys, to name a few.

So just a quick check of your county council's website's recycling pages will give you the info you need to make a conscious choice to recycle what you can on the plastic front, if you're not doing it already.  Once you've got the info you need, it's easy to get into the habit of recycling. 

Also worth a mention on this subject - the machine which recycles plastic bottles and at the same time provides water for stray animals.  Click here to see a previous post about this amazing idea that became a reality!