Recycle week - 18 to 24 June
Published Monday, 18 June 2012
This year will be a bumper year for outdoor celebrations but less than half the plastic bottles and cans will go for recycling.
Recycle Week (18 to 24 June) is therefore challenging us to use this summer's events to recycle a bumper amount of plastic bottles and cans.
During the summer months there are more outdoor events like festivals, parades and gala days; however events this year such as Euro 2012, the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and street and garden parties like the ones at the recent Jubilee, could as much as triple waste.
Thanks to technology, it's possible to recycle ALL shapes and sizes of bottle. Despite this, only 26% of them currently make the recycling bin. So whether it's milk, shampoo, bleach, shower gel or even plastic bottles used outside in the garden or kept in the shed - all you have to do is wash 'em and squash 'em!
Charlie Kelly, the council's Waste Manager, who is supporting Recycle Week, says the good news is it's never been easier to recycle all sorts of materials, at home or away.
In South Lanarkshire we collect recycling materials from most households but where we can't we provide sixty four recycling points across the area to help residents do their bit and recycle. Most council offices and buildings also provide staff with the opportunity to recycle some of the waste they generate while at work.
Recycling not only protects our natural resources, but provides energy savings too. If everyone in Scotland recycled just one extra plastic bottle during Recycle Week, this would save enough energy to power more than 6000 plasma screen TVs for a year. Recycling also benefits the environment by significantly reducing air and water pollutants.
To see what else you can recycle, please go to our recycling pages. And more information about Recycle Week is on the Recycle for Scotland website.
Top suggestions for Recycle Week:
- Don't forget to recycle your plastic bottles. Recycling just one plastic bottle saves enough energy to power a 60W light bulb for six hours. Before recycling, remove the tops, rinse your bottles out, squash them and put them in to your recycling bin. You don't need to remove the labels as this is done as part of the recycling process
- Don't forget to recycle your drinks cans. Recycling one aluminium can saves enough energy to power a television set for three hours. If everyone in Scotland recycled just one more drink can each during Recycle Week, we'd save enough energy to light nearly 20,000 light bulbs constantly for a year
- Only print if we have to, and print double sided if we can. In Scotland we use 1 million tonnes of paper and cardboard every year.
- Recycle ink cartridges rather than throwing them away - 34 million inkjet cartridges are needlessly sent to landfill each year. That's enough to fill 18 of our school buses
- Using a glass or mug saves wasted disposable cups. Every year we use 340 million plastic cups in Scotland - mostly used once and thrown away
