Are You Recycling Properly?

With British households recycling 12m tonnes of waste a year, Kim Willis, 39, investigates if she’s doing hers right

- Kim Willis

Dragging the wheelie bin into its collection zone, I stop abruptly when I hear the sound of glass clinking. Glass! In the cardboard bin! Someone’s in trouble.

If there was a medal for Best at Recycling in my house, it’d be hung around my neck. My husband Gaz, 39, mindlessly puts glass in the cardboard bin all the time and, as if to demonstrate how little he engages with the process, on the rare occasion he does put the bins out, he asks questions like, ‘What goes in this bin?’ and ‘What’s collected this week?’ We’ve lived here eight years. Eight years I’ve been putting cardboard in the blue-lidded wheelie bin, glass in the black box and non-recyclables in the general waste bin. My dad Bryan, 75, lives next door and infuriates me by putting rigid plastic in the plastics bin. It’s for shampoo bottles and yogurt pots, Dad! Not the guttering and industrial tubing left over from whatever project he’s been up to in his workshop. But am I really so much better at recycling than the men in my life? I like to think so, but I’m in for a shock.

Monday

As Chief Recycler, it’s me who puts bottles, veg trays, tins, cartons, paper, cardboard and foil in the wheelie bin, but although there’s a list of what can go in on the lid, I do not know every recycling rule, tip and guideline. On the Wiltshire Council website, I learn that recycling correctly calls for much more attention to detail.