We are trying to do better at our school at recycling waste at large scale events. We have therefore now adopted a scheme of setting up banks of bins with clearly labelled recycling labels, and where possible have them manned by personnel to direct people to the right bins. It has worked so far, and we are doing much better at separating our waste.
Well, rubber is in fact recyclable strictly speaking, but you would need an awful lot of them to make it worth anybody’s while. Some people may even say it’s compostable given that it is originally made from a natural product, but the processing it goes through to form it into products can make it very slow or even impossible to decompose.
When MPs announced in January that they were introducing a new latte levy, you may remember that our reaction was one of utter dismay. See our blog post of 5 January – Disposable Coffee Cups | The Full Picture.
Are Bear Yo Yo wrappers recyclable? They feel papery but they also have a shiny inner coating. We contacted the manufacturers directly to find out and they told us all about their packaging.
So what a delight to start a new year with the environment so high up on everyone’s agenda. Whatever you thought of the Prime Minister’s speech on the 25 year Environmental Plan, the fact that she felt the need to make it, means that the Government think there’s an appetite for matters environmental at the moment, which is good news indeed. The Attenborough factor has to be high on the list reasons as to why this has suddenly popped into the public consciousness but that’s fine – he’s a legend. However, we think that in order to tackle the problem, we need to have a very long hard look at how we got to where we are in the first place.
Anybody else getting increasingly uncomfortable with the shelf life of all this very expensive technology available to us and how disposable particularly they seem to be? I know I am! And here we go again with not one new version of an iPhone, but three of them!
There are those of us of a certain age which will no doubt remember with fondness being urged to collect postage stamps for whichever Blue Peter Appeal was applicable at the time. It was almost a way of life. Blue Peter always made the best of what everybody else was going to throw away, whether it be cereal packets, the labels off of Heinz Baked Bean tins, or postage stamps.
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