Tag: Upcycling

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.

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

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!

Welcome to Recycle Week!

This week we’re bring you a series of posts in honour of Recycle Week, a national event that takes place every year to help you recycle more.

This year’s theme is ‘recycling around the home’ so we’ll be taking you on a tour of some rooms in your home that you perhaps hadn’t thought were recycling hotspots before!

Before we get started, why not take a quick look back at last year’s Recycle Week, which focused on ‘recycling at home and away’. You can find our post about home and away recycling, as well as more information on recycling electronics and clothing. Hopefully you’ll pick up some hints that will aid you in this year’s Recycle Week!

Recycling Facts and Figures

To kick our week off, we’re going to give you some facts and figures about recycling that should make it clear why we think Recycle Week is so important.

If you know of any facts about recycling that you think everyone should know then head over to twitter and tweet @LocalGreenPts to let us know! We might even include the best ones in our summary post on Friday!

• If everyone in the UK recycled one toothpaste box, it would save enough energy to run a fridge in 2,000 homes for a year.
• If one aluminium air freshener aerosol can was recycled by everyone in the UK, enough energy could be saved to vacuum over 870,000 homes for a year.
• If everyone in the UK recycled one aluminium deodorant aerosol, enough energy could be saved to vacuum over 480,000 homes for a year.
• Plastic bottles can be recycled into footy shirts, fleeces and new plastic bottles.
• It takes 7 days for a recycled newspaper to come back again as newspaper.
• Paper and card can come back as loft insulation.
• Cans and tins can come back as car parts, aeroplane wings and new cans.
• Drinks cans from around the home are recycled into new cans which can be back on the shelves in just 8 weeks.

Tomorrow we’ll be kicking off our tour of the home by looking at what you can recycle in the kitchen!