The Waste Management & Recycling Blog – Page 13 – – Doing our bit for the environment

How to avoid single-use coffee cups

Single-use coffee cups have featured in the news a lot over the past few years, primarily due to the fact that they are difficult to recycle and the UK gets through 2.5 billion of them per year.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall brought ‘disposable’ cups to the public eye on his War on Waste programme back in March 2016, and there’s been much public discussion ever since.

Coffee fans the country over have been caught up in the discussion over the takeaway cups used to house their beloved flat white or frothy cappuccino.

How to recycle your mail

We may live in a digital age, but the Royal Mail is still busy delivering letters and parcels across the country.

Whether we like it or not (and it tends to be a ‘not’ if it’s a brown envelope), we all receive post in one form or another.

Many of us receive junk mail through our letterboxes, alongside official letters about tax, voting, bills, and more.

Some of us are lucky enough to receive handwritten notes from family, friends, and pen-pals, too.

This mail builds up to a significant amount of waste, so we’ll explain how best to dispose of it in this blog post.

How students should deal with waste when moving out

At the end of the academic year, the majority of students move out of their student housing and head home, never to return to the same property again. Enter changeover day!

Recent surveys suggest that the 18-24 age group is more wasteful than others, and one can easily imagine so when you consider the lifestyle of the average student — regular takeaways from single-use containers, parties, etc.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to all younger people or students, or even the majority — but evidence suggests it does apply to some, and that is why we are writing this blog post.

How to create an eco-friendly bathroom

Of all the rooms in a house, the bathroom rivals the kitchen for the most waste produced. However, it’s also the room where people are most likely to forget to be kind to the environment.

So, how can you create an eco-friendlier bathroom? Follow our top tips below to get started.

How litter harms our wildlife

Litter is a real buzzword at the moment, with plastic litter being the central focus. Thanks to Sir David Attenborough’s recent documentaries, people’s eyes are now being opened to the true extent of the world’s plastic dependence and the related litter problem.

Shocking as the sight of all the litter was on these shows and in newspapers of late, it was the impact the waste had on the wildlife that really helped to highlight the issue.

Seemingly quite pivotal viewing, the video below shows just some of the ways that Blue Planet 2 inspired people to make changes in their lives.

In fact, it is estimated that one million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die annually as a result of eating plastic or getting trapped in it.

How eco-friendly is Glastonbury Festival?

Following every year of Glastonbury Festival, the media is awash with images of the trash left behind by the festivalgoers once they have headed for home. This equates to fields of litter, some recyclable and some not, all left for someone else to deal with.

This has sadly become the norm over the years, with around 8oo litter pickers descending upon the festival site to gather up all of the rubbish and deliver it to the onsite recycling centre — both throughout the festival and when it is over.

In this blog post, we look at how eco-friendly the Glastonbury Festival is — from its waste to its energy, to its plastic use.

How to reduce your carbon footprint when travelling

We live in a time where travel is prevalent — both for work and leisure. However, this travel can come at a large cost to the planet by way of carbon emissions, and some travel habits truly have a huge impact.

Flights, for example, are relatively cheap to buy but planes produce very high carbon emissions. Until new aircraft arrives, flights will, unfortunately, remain one of the most significant contributors to the issue of climate change.

So, how can we all travel in an eco-friendlier way? We’ve gathered some ideas for you below.

What is aluminium?

Most of us know that aluminium is used to make drink cans, food tins, and aerosol sprays. Many of us also know that it can be recycled. However, what the majority of us don’t know is what aluminium is and where it originates.

Read on to discover all the fascinating facts and figures related to aluminium — you’ll never look at a can of pop in quite the same way again!

A beginner’s guide to geocaching

If you love exploring the great outdoors, finding new places of interest, and taking part in treasure hunts, then geocaching could be the hobby for you. Play alone, with friends, or with your whole family — people of all ages love this pastime.

So, let’s get into what it is and how you play it.

Continue reading A beginner’s guide to geocaching

600,000 Leeds coffee cups recycled in six months

In just six months of the Leeds By Example campaign, Forge Recycling has collected 600,000 coffee cups from drop-off points around the city centre. That is 600,000 cups that have been diverted from landfill.

These cups have all been lightly sorted, compacted, and delivered to the James Cropper recycling facility in Burneside, Kendal. There, they are stripped down, with the paper being removed and then used to make new products.

Alongside the coffee cup success, 65,000 cans and 55,000 plastic bottles were collected by us during the six-month period in Leeds.

Continue reading 600,000 Leeds coffee cups recycled in six months