New year recycling resolutions
Allerdale Borough Council is urging its residents to keep up
their New Year recycling resolutions well into 2009.
Despite reports in some other areas of the country, where
recyclable material cannot be sold on so has to be stored,
Allerdale Borough Council's outlets have secured markets for the
material they handle. This means items collected for recycling from
homes within the borough are still being reprocessed.
Allerdale Borough Council is committed to maintaining the
recycling services it provides and is keen that its residents
continue to use them.
In order to sustain the
recycling market that we currently have it is important
to make sure that the quality of material we collect is kept high.
This ensures that there is a high demand for the material.
For this reason it has never been more
important to ‘wash and squash’ plastic bottles and tin cans before
recycling.
Rinsing out and squashing recyclables both
increases the quality of the material and makes collection of the
material more efficient. Both of these are important in maintaining
a strong recycling market. Plastic bottle tops should be removed to
squash the bottles but tops can still be placed in the purple bag
for recycling.
Early indications show that residents have committed to
recycling much of their waste with an increase in both the use of
recycling bring sites and kerbside collections over the Christmas
and New Year period.
Currently 22,041 properties in Allerdale - nearly half the
borough - are included
in the kerbside purple bag recycling
scheme, which collects plastic bottles, cans, jars and bottles
directly from people's homes. We intend to roll the scheme out to
as many properties as possible in the future.
The purple bags are transported
in bulk to a materials recycling facility operated by Greenstar in
Darwin, Lancashire.
Greenstar supplies glass from the
plant for use as road surface, whilst the cans - both
aluminium and steel - are recycled back into new products.
Greenstar claims to be one of the few bottle-to-bottle plastic
recycling suppliers in the UK. Paper and card is sent to the
mills for use as newspapers and card packaging.
We would like to remind residents who are not on the purple bag
kerbside collection scheme that recycling banks are placed at or
near to supermarkets in many towns across the borough. This means
there is no need to make a special journey - you can simply drop
off your recycling on your way to do the shopping.
Another important area where everybody can help is in waste
reduction. Not creating waste in the first place means it will not
need to be recycled. Try to buy produce that does not have too much
wrapping Also, avoid throwing away food – only buy what you know
you will eat - this could even end up saving you money.
For more information on recycling, call Allerdale Borough
Council’s Recycling team on 01900 702800, email: recycling@allerdale.gov.uk
or visit www.allerdale.gov.uk/recycling