Children in Wealden invited to The Big Recycling Hunt

This year’s Recycling Week - 16–22 October - is inviting children aged five to 11 in Wealden to help protect the planet.

“The Big Recycling Hunt”, the central theme of this year’s campaign, promises to shine a bright spotlight on “missed capture” and aims to engage children and families in the quest to find ‘lost recyclables’ that too often find their way into the rubbish bin.

By focusing on commonly missed items such as empty aerosols, plastic cleaning product bottles, plastic toiletry bottles, plastic pots and tubs, and food tins, the Recycle Now campaign group wants to foster a deeper understanding of recycling in the younger generation.

Wealden District Council reported that residents in Wealden recycle more than 45% of their waste, but there is always more that we can do as a district. One way of achieving this is to make sure shampoo and cleaning product bottles are in your household recycle bin as they are in the top five of items that end up in landfill.

Councillor Gareth Owen-Williams, Alliance for Wealden (Liberal Democrat), and lead councillor for Waste and Customer Services, said, “It is vital that we encourage children to learn about recycling and its importance as they are the generation who will be continuing the hard work that we do now to protect our planet in the future.

“There is always room for improvement when it comes to recycling, and we have designed The Recyclopedia to help guide residents if they are confused about which bin certain items needs to go into. It is easy to use and can help us reduce the number of wrong items going to landfill.”

If you are unsure of what you can recycle in Wealden, click the link below for an easy-to-use resource. (www.wealden.gov.uk/recycling-and-waste/recyclopedia)

Craig Stephens, Campaign manager for Recycle Now, “By recycling even better we can have a big impact on our environment. In Wealden it’s no different – more and more people are recycling, so the next step is to make sure we hunt down these missed items and get our recycling right. So come on Wealden, keep up the great work and let’s make the district’s recycling better than ever before.”

To find out more about Recycle Week visit www.recyclenow.com/RecycleWeek