Waste and Recycling
What can be Recycled?
If you can't reduce or reuse an item, can it be recycled ? or, if it is organic
material like grass cuttings or vegetable food scrapings, composted?
Recycling means using valuable raw materials like glass, paper, tin and aluminium
over and over again so we don't always have to make them from scratch.
Recycle your ...
- Glass bottles and jars
- Newspapers
- Magazines/Catalogues
- Clean cardboard - with no food residue
- Junk Mail
- Telephone directories (including Yellow Pages)
- Paper based food and beverage cartons, e.g. Tetrapak cartons
- Shredded paper, all envelopes (including window envelopes), computer paper
- Books, hardbacks and paperbacks
- Plastic bottles (without lids)
- Plastic food containers and ready-made meal trays (washed and top film removed)
- Cans – steel and aluminium food and drinks cans (please rinse and flatten if possible)
- Clean textiles, clothing etc.
- Shoes
- Mobile phones/household batteries
- Metal Pots and pans
- Clean aluminium foil and trays
- Other metals
- Biscuits/Sweet tins
- Heavy duty Polythene
What can I compost?
- Anything that was once living will compost, but some items are best avoided. Meat,
dairy and cooked food can attract vermin and should not be home-composted.
- For best results, use a mixture of types of ingredient. The right balance is something
learnt by experience, but a rough guide is to use equal amounts by volume of greens
and browns (see below).
- Some things, like grass mowings and soft young weeds, rot quickly. They work as
'activators', getting the composting started, but on their own will decay to a smelly
mess.
- Older and tougher plant material is slower to rot but gives body to the finished
compost - and usually makes up the bulk of a compost heap. Woody items decay very
slowly; they are best chopped or shredded first, where appropriate.
Compost ingredients
- Comfrey leaves
- Nettles
- Grass cuttings
Other green materials
- Raw vegetable peelings from your kitchen
- Tea bags and leaves, coffee grounds
- Young green weed growth - avoid weeds with seeds
- Soft green prunings
- Animal manure from herbivores eg cows and horses
- Poultry manure and bedding
'Browns' or carbon rich ingredients - slow to rot
- Cardboard eg. cereal packets and egg boxes although it is better for the environment
to send these for recycling.
- Newspaper - although it is better for the environment to send your newspapers for
recycling
- Bedding from vegetarian pets eg rabbits, guinea pigs hay, straw, shredded paper,
wood shavings
- Tough hedge clippings
- Woody prunings
- Old bedding plants
- Bracken
- Sawdust
- Wood shavings
- Fallen leaves can be composted but the best use of them is to make leaf mould
Other compostable items
- Wood ash, in moderation
- Hair, nail clippings
- Egg shells (crushed)
- Natural fibres eg. 100% wool or cotton
Do NOT compost
- Meat
- Fish
- Cooked food
- Coal & coke ash
- Cat litter
- Dog faeces
- Disposable nappies