As you’ll know if you’ve read my other posts on this topic, last week was Recycle Week, and I teamed up with Zero Waste Scotland to double my recycling efforts and try to get you guys to join me. If you want to find out why it’s so important that we all recycle whenever we can, check out my other two posts – here and here. Now that the official week is over, I wanted to share with you some of the recycling activities I took part in.
The area that I knew I needed to really improve on was food waste recycling – i.e. disposing of suitable food remains in a dedicated food waste caddy, instead of the general waste bin. To do this I started by trying to reduce the amount of food waste that would occur in the first place – by shopping according to specific recipes and planned portions, and by not buying any extra bottles of milk or fruit etc. If I needed more of anything, I could always go back to the supermarket. This worked well and we actually didn’t accumulate much food waste, so there is a lot to be said for the shopping smarter technique.
I was away for 36 hours towards the end of last week, in London to record a podcast, and this threw up some difficulties in my recycling routine. Before I had even left Glasgow Central station, I already had empty rubbish that I needed to dispose of – a paper takeaway coffee cup and a copy of Stylist magazine. Not only is it near enough impossible to find a normal bin in a station, recycling bins are non-existent. The same goes for onboard trains! This meant that by the time I got to London, I already had a handbag full of rubbish that I couldn’t recycle until I got back home to Glasgow. You can see where this story is heading – it all came back home with me (including a pizza box from a late night hotel snack)! It really shouldn’t be this difficult to recycle – other countries make it easy, so why can’t we?!
On Friday morning when I was home, I got woken by a courier delivering an extremely heavy mystery crate. When I opened it up, it was an epic supply of Vita Coco Coconut Water – which I don’t actually like that much. Now please don’t think that I don’t appreciate PR hampers or samples, because I do. I just think this was too large an amount of juice to send to anyone (especially if they didn’t know it was coming). I knew I wasn’t going to drink it, and I didn’t want it to go to waste either, so I looked into taking it to one of the local supermarket’s food bank donations bins. They wouldn’t take it though, as they only accept long-life products such as tins or UHT milk. So, I ended up having to take it all to an actual food bank centre and left it there for them to give out to the people coming for supplies that afternoon.
With last week also marking the end of summer and the start of autumn, I also had a huge wardrobe clear out. I already donated quite a few very wearable items to TK Maxx’s charity appeal earlier in the month, but I still had some items that were a bit worn or had a stain on them etc. I took these to a local community clothes recycling bin so that they could be used as textile recycling and sorted – either to reuse, use for rags or use as fiber. The items I donated will either turned into fibers that can be used to make a new item of clothing, or will be used to make industrial cleaning rags or wipes.
Did you take part in Recycle Week?
This is a sponsored post with Zero Waste Scotland, but all opinions are my own.
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