In recent years, we have seen first-hand the impact climate change has had on our planet. We have seen the devastating effects that plastic waste is having on the environment and causing incredible damage to our wildlife and ecosystem. Now, more than ever, we need to start making drastic changes to our habits to create a better future for life on our planet. One way to kickstart these habits is to recycle. When you recycle, you are taking something old and making it new again, which means fewer materials and natural resources are being wasted. This in turn benefits the environment by cutting the cost of energy used during the manufacturing process, less waste ends up going to the landfills, and keeps our wildlife safe. Recycling paper and wood saves trees and forests, recycling plastic means less creation of new plastic made from fossil fuels, Recycling metals means there’s less need for risky, expensive, and damaging mining and extraction of new metal ores, and recycling glass reduces the need to use new raw materials like sand. It may seem impossible to believe, but our natural resources are becoming scarce. We need to do our best to make a change to reduce our carbon footprint and save our planet.
The Basics of Recycling: Where to start
The best way to start is to educate yourself on what can be recycled. It’s no good throwing any and everything into bins without checking if the items you are throwing away are recyclable. This can delay the waste management process and create confusion for the people who handle it. Here are a few examples of what you can recycle:
- Paper and Cardboard. This includes printer paper, normal office paper, books, toilet roll inners, and newspapers to name a few.
- Plastic. This includes most plastic containers such as cool drink and water bottles, cleaning product bottles, milk bottles as well as butter and ice cream tubs. It also has things like cling and bubble wrap as well as soft plastic bags and packaging.
- Cans. This can include all cans from cool drinks to canned food. Paint cans and aerosol cans can be recycled too.
- Glass. Glass bottles such as wine bottles, food jars, drinking bottles as well as sauce and spice bottles.
Unfortunately, not everything can be recycled. These are the types of items that we should avoid using, as much as we can. Here are a few examples of items that cannot be recycled:
- Laminated or waxy paper
- Polystyrene
- Cigarette ends
- Stickers or ‘Post-it’ notes
- Confetti
- Sweet and chip wrappers
Once you have a good understanding of what you can and can’t recycle, you can start to identify the areas in your day-to-day routine where you can implement recycling. A really good way to do this is to have separate bins for the different types of recyclable materials. This makes it easy for you and others to separate recyclable items and dispose of them accordingly. One of the most common things that you will see around you today are recycling bins. Once these bins are filled with the material the same is then picked by the local municipal body or local recycling firms to process those and make new products from them. These bins can be separated by signs or different colours.
The Basics of Recycling: The Different Recycling Bins
If you’ve ever seen recycling bins that are all sorts of different colours, it’s because there is now a fun colour-coding system to help people know where to put their waste. To make recycling fun and easy, the wheelie bins have been given dedicated colours to show you which bin is for which recyclable materials. This is a great way to implement recycling in a way that creates awareness around the importance of recycling as well as ensuring the bins don’t get mixed with the wrong materials.
- Green. Green bins are for all plastic waste.
- Black. Black bins is where your general waste and non-recyclable materials go.
- Blue. Blue bins is dedicated to glass products.
- Yellow. Yellow bins is where all the paper and cardboard recyclable materials go.
- Red. Reb bins is where all canned and tin recyclable products go. Red is also used for all medical waste.
Just like that, recycling is made easy. If we keep taking small steps and continue doing our best to lessen the damage our pollution makes, we can make a brighter future for our earth and all the people that live in it. At Sanitize Today, we strive to give our customers the best options for implementing recycling initiatives and carry all the wheelie bin colours to assist in your recycling journey.
