Category: Recycling

We may live in a digital age, but the Royal Mail is still busy delivering letters and parcels across the country.

Whether we like it or not (and it tends to be a ‘not’ if it’s a brown envelope), we all receive post in one form or another.

Many of us receive junk mail through our letterboxes, alongside official letters about tax, voting, bills, and more.

Some of us are lucky enough to receive handwritten notes from family, friends, and pen-pals, too.

This mail builds up to a significant amount of waste, so we’ll explain how best to dispose of it in this blog post.

Continue reading How to recycle your mail

Most of us know that aluminium is used to make drink cans, food tins, and aerosol sprays. Many of us also know that it can be recycled. However, what the majority of us don’t know is what aluminium is and where it originates.

Read on to discover all the fascinating facts and figures related to aluminium — you’ll never look at a can of pop in quite the same way again!

Continue reading What is aluminium?

In just six months of the Leeds By Example campaign, Forge Recycling has collected 600,000 coffee cups from drop-off points around the city centre. That is 600,000 cups that have been diverted from landfill.

These cups have all been lightly sorted, compacted, and delivered to the James Cropper recycling facility in Burneside, Kendal. There, they are stripped down, with the paper being removed and then used to make new products.

Alongside the coffee cup success, 65,000 cans and 55,000 plastic bottles were collected by us during the six-month period in Leeds.

Continue reading 600,000 Leeds coffee cups recycled in six months

Closed loop recycling may be a term you have heard before, or perhaps not, but we thought it might be helpful to delve into the topic on our blog and discuss what closed loop recycling is and why it is important.

In a nutshell, closed loop recycling is the process by which a product is used, recycled, and then made into a new product — therefore not ever entering landfill.

This means that these waste types are better for the environment than those that are recycled but have to be mixed with virgin materials to make new products (this is open loop recycling), and, of course, those that can’t be recycled at all.

Continue reading What is closed loop recycling?

A recent survey by compliance scheme REPIC has revealed that under-30s are choosing to sell on older electrical items rather than recycle them. This is good news for the environment, as items are having their life extended through reuse, however it is bad news for the measurement of the UK’s WEEE recycling.

Continue reading Young people are selling electronics on rather than recycling them

Recycling is a hot topic right now, and rightly so — it is an important method of saving the majority of our waste from landfill sites. Waste sent to landfill results in further use of virgin materials, and a negative impact upon the environment in terms of leeching and CO2 emissions. In fact, the recycling industry reduces CO2 emissions by 700 million tons per year, which is the equivalent of offsetting the total CO2 emissions of the aviation industry each year!

So, this month sees the arrival of Global Recycling Day. We’ve received a few questions about what this is and how people can get involved in it, so we thought we’d write a blog post dedicated to it. After all, we love all things recycling!

Continue reading What is Global Recycling Day?

Most offices across the country have a stock of padded envelopes in their stationery cupboard, as do many homes. These envelopes are made from paper and plastic bubble wrap usually and are ideal for posting anything that needs a bit of extra protection as it makes its way through the postal system. As online shopping has increased in popularity, so has the use of these packages. However, once a padded envelope has been used, what happens to it? Can it be recycled?

Continue reading Can padded envelopes be recycled?

Since 1988, it’s been easy to identify what type of plastic many products, packaging and containers are made from, thanks to the creation of the Resin Identification Code, or RIC.

This is the number enclosed within a triangle that appears on many plastic items as a guide to its recyclability – but although the symbol originally included the familiar ‘recycling symbol’ of three arrows arranged in a triangular shape, not all plastics marked in this way are actually recyclable.

More recently, it is common to see a solid triangle rather than the triangular ‘recycling’ arrows, in an attempt to reduce the risk of non-recyclable plastics being misinterpreted.

Continue reading Why can’t all plastic be recycled?