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Recycle - you know it's goodDoers doing this DoAction have pledged to save: 875 kg CO₂

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With landfills filling up faster than a shopping mall on Christmas eve, recycling should be a no brainer. Yet across the channel, Britain has earned the glamorous title of the ‘dustbin of Europe’ because we dump so much of our household waste in the ground¹.

95%

less energy is used recycling aluminium cans than creating new ones from raw materials, and it saves enough energy to power a TV for three hours!

Check out what recycling your council accepts and get going – you’ll help to prevent the need for new landfills, mines, quarries, and logging, while saving about 250Kg CO₂ each year.

Why?

Money

With landfill taxes on the up and council budgets on the down, recycling your waste is a great way to help your council save money for the things that really need it.

Resource conservation

You can’t make something out of nothing. Each time a new product is made, we need to extract fresh resources from the earth – through mining, quarrying, or tree felling. Unless, of course, it’s made from magical recycled materials, like fleeces out of plastic bottles or insulation from old newspapers.

Climate change

Greenhouse gases are emitted from every stage of the lifecycle of your household goods, from extracting, refining, transporting and processing the raw materials, right through to landfilling the finished product. In fact, landfills themselves produce about three per cent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions². That’s a big chunk that we can cut out pretty easily.

Landfills

It’s funny to think of landfill sites as a precious resource, but they’re filling up so quickly that we could soon struggle to find space to bury our ever-growing mountains of waste. Councils warn that unless we start recycling more of our waste, Britain might run out of landfill space by 2018¹.

How?

RecycleNow is perfect for working out what recycling your council collects. It has a handy post-code search tool and will provide you with all the waste-sorting info you could ever dream of.

With plastics, check out the little number hidden on the base, inside a small triangle. It tells you the quality grade (1-8) of the plastic, which determines whether or not it can be recycled in your area.