Recycle Week is a great opportunity to consider how we can all do more to help increase recycling rates throughout the UK, and generally lessen our impact on the environment.
As businesses, it is our moral responsibility to provide truly recyclable packaging to our customers, which they should be able to recycle at ease either whether at home or on the street.
How can we do this? … The simplest way is to ensure your packaging is made from a singular material, and for that material to be either paper or PET based. Ideally, it would have already been made using recycled material.
As consumers, we should be demanding that the businesses we buy from are using truly recyclable packaging and not simply greenwashing their efforts. We need to create the demand that will cause businesses to make the change.
We should also be encouraging the use of post-consumer recycled material. By encouraging this usage, we can help to increase the demand, in turn motivating waste management companies to recycle more - subsequently increasing investment in recycling and increasing rates in general within the UK.
We can also help to improve recycling rates by doing a couple of very simple things, such as washing out food packaging to make it as clean as possible and separating out different materials.
Whether businesses or consumers, we should also always be making sure we are educating ourselves on the pros and cons of the materials we use, as well as the disposal methods.
One of which is the amount of material we ship overseas for ‘recycling’. We believe that waste generated by our country should be dealt with in our country.
Helping to increase recycling rates within the UK is just one area we are working on in our journey to becoming truly sustainable.
