This week is Recycle Week and now in its 15th year, Recycle Week is a celebration of recycling, organised by WRAP under the Recycle Now brand. The aim of the week is to encourage the public to recycle more, by demonstrating the benefits of recycling items from all around the home.

There is lots of information on the Recycle Week webpage including some really interesting material about helping to increase recycling rates by persuading people to end the ‘rubbish bin first’ mindset (i.e. recycling is something you separate out from ‘normal’ waste) and to change this to separating items out from the recycling to put into residual waste (i.e recycling becomes the new norm). A key change in public behaviour seems to be to make recycling the public norm, so that people who aren’t particularly interested in recycling will do it because everybody else is and they don’t want to be the odd ones out.

Bristol Waste Company have recently run a very successful (and award winning!) campaign called Slim My Waste, Feed My Face to encourage and persuade all residents across Bristol to separate out and recycle their food waste rather than putting it in the black bin – one of the main pieces of this campaign was supplying households with funny face stickers to decorate their food waste bin and people were then encouraged to post these on social media. I’ve been amazed at the variety of designs which people have created - having a decorated food waste bin has become the social norm over the course of the campaign and it is very obvious on recycling day if you are not involved as your bin isn’t personalised!

Bristol’s food waste goes to a company called GENeco in Avonmouth where it goes through an anaerobic digestion process to be turned into methane which is then burnt to produce electricity and gas for the local area, the remaining processed food waste is turned into fertiliser for farmers – find out more from Bristol Waste Company on their website.

Recycle Week - HKW Risk Management Does, Do you?