Recycle Week 2024

Recycle Week (organised by Recycle Now) is the UK’s biggest celebration of recycling. For Recycle Week 2024, Dudley joins an urgent crusade to save five packaging heroes from being rubbished and keeping them out of the bin and living the circular life, through recycling.

The latest Recycle Now research shows that while we’re a nation of recyclers - nine out of ten people regularly recycle – nearly eight out of ten of us (79%) put one or more items into the bin that could have been recycled.

Items which often get binned rather than recycled include spray deodorants, plastic trigger spray bottles, yoghurt pots, glass perfume bottles and toilet roll tubes all of which can be kept in circulation by recycling.

Currently, recycling in Dudley is separated at the kerbside by residents, allowing  maximum quality with limited contamination, making the material more attractive to processors and achieving better rebates to help offset some of our service costs.

Each material type is collected from the kerbside and transported to the council’s depot in Netherton.

The glass is washed and sorted by colour using laser technology. The glass is then crushed and melted and is recycled into new bottles and jars. The glass fines not suitable for recycling are used as aggregate for road surfacing. 

The plastic and cans leave the depot and go to a materials recycling facility. Metals are separated from plastics using magnets and are then split again into aluminium and steel.  They are all squashed to form bales and are sold on to manufacturers. The plastics are sorted by colour using optical sorting technology, washed to remove contamination, and shredded into flakes.  Once dried, the flakes are gently heated up to form pellets and are then sent onto manufacturers for reuse.

Paper and card is offloaded at a separation plant and is sorted into the two streams, pulped, cleansed and then the fibres are bleached. Once dried, the finished product is cut to the length specified by the end customer. 

Dudley Council has also been gearing up for Recycle week by holding a series of school talks and community events to promote reuse and recycling. Most recently it has been running reuse events - Too Good To Throw Away - where residents are able to re-home items, such as beds, sofas, wardrobes, pots, pans, cutlery and crockery, electrical items bedding, towels, cooking equipment, food and toiletry packages they no longer need but are Too Good To Throw Away. In partnership with local charity Provision House, these items are re-used through the starting over programme for people most in need. Across the four pilot events over four tonnes of items have been collected for REUSE.

Councillor Paul Bradley, cabinet member for climate change, said:

“Recycling is so worthwhile. It means valuable materials can be recaptured - recycled - and used again.

“While many of our residents do their bit, we want to remind people of the five items that are so frequently overlooked and thrown in the bin when they could go back into the system for future use - spray deodorants, plastic trigger spray bottles, yoghurt pots, glass perfume bottles and toilet roll tubes. Remember, you can pop all of these in your collection.”

Find out what you can and can’t recycle online www.dudleyrecycles.org.uk

People can sign up to the council’s email bulletin for information about recycling https://public.govdelivery.com/accounts/UKDUDLEYMBC/signup/26291

#RescueMeRecycle and #RecycleWeek