A Lancashire borough has launched a new recycling service to take away items normally destined for the general bin.
This means households can send waste such as cookie wrappers, Pringles tubes, plastic toothbrushes and coffee bags for reprocessing. Blackburn and Darwen Council have agreed a six-month trial with US recycling organization TerraCycle to collect items not normally collected from curbside for salvage. The inhabitants can take the objects to the landfills of the arrondissement rather than depositing them in their general Burgundy bins.
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The new items eligible for recycling are:
• all Pringle tubes – lids can be recycled at the curb;
• all brands of packaging for biscuits, crackers and cakes, with the exception of packaging for chocolate bars and cookie trays;
• all brands of coffee soft packs but not ground coffee, individual sachets and coffee capsules.
• all brands of manual toothbrushes, dental floss containers, electric dental floss tips, dental floss sticks and interdental brushes, although toothpaste tubes, battery-powered toothbrushes and dental floss are not accepted .
To use the service, the household must collect the packaging of the relevant product from home, request free recycling labels using the form on the RecycleBwD website, stick the label on a plastic bag (preferably transparent) and take it to a household waste recycling centre. The different categories of articles must be separated and not mixed. The trial is the latest step in a campaign to improve poor recycling rates since 2019, when they were below 40%.
Cllr Jim Smith, Blackburn with Darwen Council’s environment boss, said: ‘We are delighted to be partnering with TerraCycle and offering our residents the opportunity to recycle even more items. Being chosen as a partner for this trial is a fantastic opportunity and we encourage each of our residents to get involved – it’s really easy to participate.
“Increasing recycling rates, reducing food waste and reducing contamination are key priorities for us over the next year and beyond.”
The waste will be recycled by crushing, cleaning and turning it into plastic pellets, which can then be used by manufacturers to create new plastic products. Julien Tremblin, Managing Director of TerraCycle Europe, said, “Darwen is home to TerraCycle’s materials recovery facility, so we already know the area and know how invested many residents are in sustainability. This made it an ideal location for this exciting pilot project.
The borough has two household waste landfills at George Street West in Blackburn and Spring Vale Road in Darwen.
In 2021, the council started recycling plastic films with the American company TerraCycle.