Mark Buckton, Recycling Champions Coordinator with Cambridge City Council, rose to the challenge presented by our top-notch audience, who asked insightful questions about recycling for two solid hours!
Amongst the questions answered:
- Yes you can mock people who clip strings off tea bags. They break down in the compost, don’t worry. Similarly, don’t bother tearing the windows out of envelopes, they disolve.
- Contaminating recycling with the wrong kind or not washing it out really reduced the value of the recycling – so err on the side of caution if you’re not sure where something goes!
- Videotapes are the absolute worst thing to put in the recycling as it gets caught up in the machinery and must be shut down to remove it!
One poignant thought Mark left us with that night that a plastic bottle in the rubbish is basically a dinosaur in your bin. The plastics that went into making that bottle were derived from fossil fuels; what a shame if in its long, long history of being an ancient creature, being buried and subjected to pressure in the earth’s crust, being pumped out, processed and turned into a bottle, that was the end of that material’s life, never to be transformed again, but just to sit in a landfill for eons. So recycle your bottles (and everything else).
If you missed Mark’s talk, there’s more info on recycling on the City Council website here.