Recycling Day - What you can do at home

On Friday the 20^th of September it will be Recycling Day. This initiative is part of Clean-up and Recycle week which runs for the whole of this week. There are community clean-ups arranged around the country for individuals to participate in making public spaces cleaner. If you would like to know about events that have been organised by Clean-up SA please visit http://www.cleanup-sa.co.za/cleanupdiary.htm

Not all of us are going to be able to be part of events like this one but we can all still do our bit. We can start recycling at home, at work and helping arrange recycling schemes at local schools.

For your own recycling at home, you should start to separate the things you throw away. There will be wet waste mostly from food stuffs and dry recyclable materials. Some of your wet waste like fruit and vegetable waste can be used in your compost heap.

Find out about recycling schemes in your area. Some suburbs have separate rubbish trucks that collect different materials – one for paper and one for glass, plastic, tin, polystyrene, etc. You may need to find a shop or school in your area that has recycling bins for you to drop your goods into.

Create separate bins or boxes to store your recyclable goods until you can dispose of them. If you can, try to colour-code your bins if you have small children. Or you can put labels on the bins if your family is older. Teach everyone in your household about what items go in which bin and what state items should be in if they are to be put in these bins. Bottles, tins and jars should be cleaned out before placing them in the recycling bin – there should not be chunks of food attached. Once your family is in the habit of sorting it’s really easy. A huge advantage of doing this is that you dramatically reduce the amount of waste that would go into your big black wheelie bin. During the last rubbish collector’s strike we only filled our big wheelie bin after 4 weeks. We’re a large family and most of throw away goods are recycled so we were barely affected by the strike.

Here’s a picture of my indoor recycling bins. I find this system works really well for my household.

I’ll be looking at other places to start recycling so check back tomorrow.