Recycling Archives

24/03/201618/05/2023

Spring clean: Clothes

Every week we are impressed by the commitment of our members to recycling everything they can, from paper to electronics, plastics to garden waste!

Alongside filling up your recycling containers each week, there are a number of ways you can get creative with recycling to repurpose your old and unwanted things. With winter behind us and March well underway, learn how to turn your trash into treasure in time for a Spring Clean.

Start your clear out in your bedroom. There are loads of ways to clear out the old clothes filling up your wardrobe:

If there are any clothes you don’t want to keep, simply donate them to a charity shop to make sure they go to a good cause.
If you’re clearing out your winter clothes to make space for a summer wardrobe, make the most of high street rewards for donating old clothes. You can donate a bag of any unwanted clothes to H&M for a £5 voucher to redeem when you spend £30 in store.
Similarly, when you donate an item of Marks & Spencer’s branded clothing to Oxfam you will receive a £5 voucher to redeem when you spend £35 in M&S. This is the perfect way to give a little back before you buy something new.
If you have more than a bag-full of unwanted, good quality clothing, why not have a car-boot sale? This is a great way to make a bit of profit on your unwanted clothes.
If a 6am start in the cold isn’t for you, you could try selling your old clothes online from the comfort of your home. Gumtree and eBay and are good places to start. You can even think a lot bigger than clothes – these sites are great for shifting used furniture and electronics too.
If your friends or colleagues want to refresh their wardrobes too you should organise a clothes swap event. Your old clothes could be just what someone else is looking for.

08/03/201618/05/2023

More local authorities adopt our community points model.

Jump’s ‘Community Points’ model for incentivising and engaging residents in waste and recycling is being increasingly adopted by local authorities.

Torbay Council was the first local authority to adopt our Community Points model for their Torbay Green Points scheme, which was launched to all 66,000 Torbay households in July 2015. Since then, Peterborough City Council, St. Helen’s Council and the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham have all opted to use our Community Points approach for their recycling rewards schemes. These will soon be joined by the Borough Council of King’s Lynn & West Norfolk who are set to launch their new scheme with us later this year.

Our Community Points Model uses competition, gamification and a sense of community to motivate, engage and encourage residents in to carry out positive waste behaviours. Research into the psychology behind lasting behaviour change shows that a strong sense of community identity and of being seen to do good by those around you can be highly motivating – perhaps for some people more so than a monetary reward! Thus a key step in the development of a Community Points model scheme is to involve residents in deciding how communities are divided and named, ensuring they identify closely with their community for the duration of the scheme.

A dynamic leader board shows participants how their community is performing at any time and there are also rewards for top performing individuals. We find this combination of personal and community rewards to be ideal for motivating waste and recycling behaviours. Using a community approach also allows us to focus heavily on supporting local charities and community projects, an element which has long been part of our schemes and proves ever-popular with residents.

12/02/201618/05/2023

RBS innovation gateway

Successful Gateway innovation, Jump, launched at RBS Trinity Quay this week, spurring employees to come out in force and pledge their commitment to ‘go green’ for Bristol.

Jump programme, one of the successful innovations chosen in the RBS Bristol Go Green Innovation Challenge, is an engagement and rewards programme which combines communication, rewards and the smart use of technology to achieve maximum employee engagement.

The Jumpteam were on hand at Trinity Quay on Monday to launch the programme and encourage employees to sign up and pledge their commitment to sustainability in the workplace. We’re delighted to reveal that over 600 employees have now signed up, that’s over 50% of all the staff in the office!

Staff were offered a KeepCup or re-usable water bottles on signing up to the programme to reduce disposable cup waste. And the restaurant at Trinity Quay is also getting behind the initiative offering a discount on all hot drinks when employees use their KeepCups.

Jump will engage employees around key themes throughout 2016: energy, paper, water, waste and travel. The energy theme will launch on March 1st and will encourage employees to reduce energy use throughout Trinity Quay.

Across all themes, the Jump platform will provide a central place for employees to track progress, collect points for making positive changes and submit their own suggestions for engaging colleagues on sustainable issues.

The Jump programme will be accessible to many more RBS employees shortly as it is scheduled to go live in 6 more RBS buildings across the UK next week.

08/02/201618/05/2023

Successfully engaging culturally diverse communities

Jump is continuing to expand, with new schemes launching across the UK: from St Helens in the North West, to Torbay in the South West, and Hammersmith & Fulham closer to our London headquarters. Enabling our schemes to succeed in culturally diverse areas can be challenging, particularly when planning and delivering door-to-door campaigns.

Key to our approach to door-to-door engagement is a recognition of the barriers that may come up when engaging with residents. In particular we always employ team members with language skills that are reflective of the local demographic.

In Autumn 2015, we worked with Rochdale Borough Council to communicate the introduction of a new food waste collection service to their residents. With a large South East Asian population in parts of the Borough it was essential that our door-to-door team were able to understand residents’ concerns and communicate effectively – whether that was in English, Urdu or Punjabi! Our team also had a good cultural understanding of food waste within the Muslim community and this helped us encourage residents to use their new food waste service effectively.

Recently we also carried out a door-to-door project for Westminster City Council to inform residents about recycling electrical items. Like Rochdale, we sought to employ people with knowledge of the local area and relevant language skills – this time conducting some resident surveys in Arabic! Whilst for our scheme with East End Homes, Tower Hamlets Community Points, local recruits Fahim and Apia enabled us to engage with the mainly Bangladeshi population of the estate in their native language, and reach those that may have otherwise been missed out!

Understanding the demographics and cultural background requires careful research and consideration, and the teams we employ are key to providing an understanding of the context we operate in and help us to deliver the best possible service for each local authority we work with.

Sarah Plant
Community and Outreach Manager
Local Green Points

25/01/201618/05/2023

Challenge yourself!

The New Year is now well under way and perhaps it’s time we all reviewed our resolutions. Are you doing well so far or do you think you could be doing better? In Hammersmith & Fulham, Jump have been providing an extra push to residents of 9,000 estate properties and are challenging them to recycle more and reduce contamination in their communal bins in order to win themselves and their estates some great cash prizes!
This has got us thinking – If you could choose one thing that you wanted to challenge yourself to do better, what would it be?

Perhaps a clean out of your wardrobe could help you start the year right. Start by challenging yourself to part with 5 items that you haven’t worn in the last year and are just hanging around causing clutter. Make sure you donate them to charity, sell them at a car boot sale or recycle them responsibly for a clutter-free mind!
If you’re feeling brave (or just have a wardrobe that’s bursting at the seams!) try choosing one more item each month that you haven’t worn and donating that too.

If you are wasting too much food, challenge yourself to write a weekly meal plan and only buy what you need. Or you could organise your fridge and freezer with items that are closer to going out of date at the front to make sure you use them up in time!

Feeling creative? How about a re-use challenge! Get together with friends and repurpose something you were going to throw away. E.g. Plastic bottles can be used for potting plants, glass jars for storing trinkets or some worn out clothing could find new life as a tea-cosy!
Or finally, how about making your own compost? You’ll have a worthy place to put all your unwanted food waste – just remember to layer it with dried leaves or sawdust for healthy, odor-free compost.

Bethany Fruen
Head of Communications
Local Green Points

06/01/201618/05/2023

Jump celebrates signing up 400th local rewards partner and reflects on a year of growth.

2015 was an exciting year for Jump, with new reward schemes launched across the UK – from St Helens in the North to Torbay in the South West and adding our 400th local reward partner in December was a milestone, demonstrating our commitment to provide residents with really attractive rewards that motivate positive waste behaviours.

Our 400th local reward partner to sign up is Sonny’s Fresh Fish Shop, a family-run fishmonger based on Elm Park high street in the London Borough of Havering. Sonny’s Fresh Fish joins a wide network of Jump local reward partners covering barbers, cafes, leisure centres, gift shops and general retailers, all of them independent local businesses.

In addition to our 400 local reward partners, our wide network of national reward partners continues to grow and means we are able to provide a wide range of national reward options from M&S vouchers to iTunes, Garden Gift Vouchers and even compospheres for the garden.

In 2015 we saw over £15,000 donated to local charity projects through our local authority reward schemes and by the year end our tally of charity partners ranged from local projects like Thamesmead Youth Voice to national charities such as Trees for Cities.
Kate Sheldon, chief executive for Trees for Cities is excited to be involved and says: “For us working with Jump is a no-brainer as we get donations generated through a mix of recycling and reduced disposal waste, plus lots of increased awareness for our cause.”

We think that 2016 is going to be another exciting year for Jump – with plenty more innovative projects to come! We look forward to sharing our news with all our partners and wish everyone a Happy New Year.

Graham Simmonds
Managing Director
Jump

BACK

27/11/201518/05/2023

Jump in.

Employee engagement is more relevant than ever. With millennials choosing their workplace based largely on corporate social responsibility and employee turnover on the rise, the importance of employee engagement cannot be overstated.

Research clearly shows that when employee engagement is high, organisations prosper. Higher levels of employee engagement correspond with better performance and productivity, more customer satisfaction and lower rates of absence through sickness, therefore having an engaged workforce is essential for growth and survival.

While most executives do see a clear need to increase employee engagement, many have yet to develop ways to measure and tackle this goal. Our Jump program makes it easy for companies to improve levels of employee engagement and therefore, their business.

JOIN the movement towards Employee Engagement! Take the first step and not only will you see your company productivity soar, but your employees will thank you. A highly engaged workforce can increase innovation, productivity, and bottom-line performance while reducing costs related to hiring and retention in highly competitive talent markets.

UPGRADE your environment. Create an environment for well-being to thrive, as an organization filled with healthy, balanced and fulfilled employees is a productive workplace. Incorporating a culture of employee engagement can not only help employees connect with one another, but it can also help create new innovations and ideas.

MOTIVATE your employees to take part in daily sustainability and well-being tasks to earn points for their team and themselves. Not only will they earn rewards for their efforts, they can feel good about being a part of something bigger! When you develop and support effective teams, you enhance the power and feeling of satisfaction of individuals working on the team. Employees need to feel that their organisation is equally invested in them.

PRACTICE what you preach. Get involved yourself, make time to participate in wellness activities and create sustainability events for your staff. Giving employees a sense of shared values and purpose by creating a relationship with them is important. Senior leadership should continuously demonstrate that employees have an impact on their work environment and are an asset to the company.

Connecting engagement to business performance requires considerable effort and top management focus but there is enormous opportunity for companies that get it right.

In today’s fast-paced business landscape employee engagement is truly one of the most beneficial investments a company can make.

13/11/201518/05/2023

“Just One Thing” campaign can have a real impact on flats.

I am excited to see Recycle for London’s new ‘Just one thing’ campaign launched this week by the Mayor of London to boost recycling in the capital. Challenging Londoners to think of ‘Just One Thing’ they can do to improve their recycling could work particularly well for residents living in flats. Typically flats recycling rates lag well behind kerbside properties, and simplifying the message and getting residents to think about one thing they can do seems realistic for people living in flats.

Our experience working with Boroughs in north, south, east, west, and central London, is that setting easy and achievable aspirations for flats is important. Jump (Local Green Points) has just won a contract with Hammersmith & Fulham for a communications campaign focused on estates and will be running an inter-estate recycling challenge which will mix community incentives with prizes for top recyclers – simple communications and easy-to-reach targets will be core to the project in keeping with ‘Just one thing’.

As Recycle for London points out – if every Londoner recycled one more glass jar a week we would save half the weight of the glass on the Shard! This kind of messaging is what makes recycling real to people…

Graham Simmonds
Managing Director
Jump (Local Green Points)

29/10/201518/05/2023

Recycling rewards with a local focus

Love Peterborough, Love Your Community, a joint project between Peterborough City Council, Amey and Jump (Local Green Points) launched just over a week ago and already hundreds of residents have signed up to take part. The scheme reaches 35,000 homes in the seven wards of Eye, Thorney, Stanground, Hampton, East,Walton, Paston and North Bretton, which have been identified as having lower than average recycling rates. Residents who have joined the scheme have a chance to earn rewards for themselves as well as rewards for their local community.

Individual rewards will take the form of vouchers for local leisure and shopping centres, as well as for composting starter packs, garden gift vouchers and electrical items. Love Peterborough, Love Your Community also focuses on rewarding communities for improving their recycling rates, with residents of the communities that recycle the most able to vote for which local charity projects they’d like to receive a share of £3,000.

The scheme encourages residents of Peterborough to take actions that not only result in less waste being produced, but that are also good for their communities – such as donating to charity shops, donating and buying items from WEEE reuse facilities and reporting flytipping.

To find out if their household is eligible to be part of the scheme, residents should send their address is using the contact form.

For more information, and to sign up for the scheme, please visit www.lovepeterborough.com

25/06/201518/05/2023

Recycle Week 2015: Day 4

Recycling in the lounge

We’re coming to the end of Recycle Week 2015 and we’re onto our final room of the tour: the lounge. If you missed them, check out our posts about recycling in the kitchen and in the bathroom to make sure that you’re recycling all that you can around your home!

Letters and junk mail

From pizza menus to bank statements, we all receive a lot of mail and it can all be easily recycled – so there’s no reason to avoid recycling in the lounge! If you’re recycling your post, don’t forget to shred any confidential documents or rip out your details! TOP TIP: If you find that you receive a lot of junk mail, then consider signing up to the Mailing Preference Service to reduce it. This is a free government scheme that aims to remove your name from up to 90% of mailing lists – simply head to the website to sign up.

Catalogues, newspapers and magazines

Watch out for those mail order catalogues, newspapers and magazines – they might make your way into your rubbish but they can be recycled! Paper from newspapers, for example, can be recycled and turned into a new newspaper in as little as 6 weeks!

Packaging

Received any parcels recently? Then the chances are that it came in a cardboard box – which can be recycled! Any other cardboard or paper packaging can also be recycled – as can padded envelopes or ‘Jiffy Bags’ (just make sure that you remove the plastic inners first!)

24/06/201518/05/2023

Recycle Week 2015: Day 3

Recycle Week 2015 – Recycling in the bathroom

Welcome to day 3 of Recycle Week! We hope you’ve found the information we’ve provided you with so far useful – in case you missed it, check out these recycling facts and figures from day 1 and information about recycling in the kitchen from day 2! Today, we’re taking a look at what you can recycle in the bathroom. We’ll let you into a secret: there’s a lot!

Plastic Bottles

If there’s one item of waste that most people produce in the bathroom it’s plastic bottles. From cleaning products to shampoo, lots of common bathroom items come in plastic bottles. The great news is that most of us can recycle all of these bottles! Whilst many people think that ‘plastic bottles’ only includes fizzy drinks or milk bottles, many Local Authorities collect all kinds of plastic bottles. Keep an eye out for the following, which can all be widely recycled:

Shampoo, conditioner and shower gel bottles; Hand-wash bottles (remove the pump first!); Bleach bottles; Cleaning sprays (remove the trigger spray first!)

Aerosols

Another item that might slip into the bathroom bin is empty aerosols. Lots of Local Authorities now accept aerosols for recycling, but once again it’s always best to check first!

Cardboard Packaging

Opening a new tube of toothpaste? Don’t forget that cardboard packaging!Putting a separate bin in your bathroom just for recycling is great way to make you think about all those small items that get thrown away. You might be surprised by how much you can recycle in your bathroom!

23/06/201518/05/2023

Recycle Week 2015: Day 2

Recycling in the kitchen

Hands up if you have a recycling bin in your kitchen? Most of us do and most of us know exactly what we can and cannot put in it. Depending on what can be recycled in your area, though, there may be some key items that end up in your normal bin instead of making their way into your recycling. Not sure about what you can recycle? Then head to Recycle Now’s Recycling Locator and enter your postcode to get all of the details you need.

Food Waste

If you’re lucky enough to have a dedicated food waste collection service then you could cut down the amount you’re throwing away by a third – that’s how much of the average rubbish bag is taken up purely by food waste! All that food waste is taken away and either turned into compost or sent for anaerobic digestion, where it breaks down to produce methane that can be used to create biogas and power homes and vehicles.

Plastic Bottles

Most UK councils accept a variety of plastic bottles for recycling, but it’s always best to check what your local authority accepts before you recycle. We all know about recycling fizzy drinks bottles or milk bottles, but have you though about recycling detergent, fabric softener, bleach, cleaning product and even handwash bottles? These can all be recycled too! Don’t forget to rise your empty bottles – this saves leftover product from leaking out and spoiling the rest of your recycling – remove the lids/sprays and squash them. Some councils do accept bottle tops for recycling, but do check first!

Plastic Packaging

The amount of plastic packaging that you can recycle in your area can vary wildly – some Local Authorities can only collect plastic bottles whilst others collect most other rigid plastic containers. One common feature across the UK is that plastic bags and films are not widely collected on the doorstep. This includes items like carrier bags, salad bags and cling film. Recycling these items is difficult, although some large supermarkets do collect film in store to recycle – but once again it varies from location to location. The best thing to do is to avoid buying items in this kind of packaging – lots of vegetables, for example, can be bought loose instead of in plastic bags.

Other Recyclable Items

There are lots of other items that can be recycled in your kitchen and thankfully the majority of them are easy to recycle – from cardboard to tins to glass, there’s very little that shouldn’t end up in your recycling bins!

Tag: Recycling