Recycling Information

Why recycle?

All the materials you recycle from home or in your local recycling banks are passed to reprocessors who turn them into a range of new products.

Using recycled materials to manufacture new items is cheaper than using raw materials and uses less energy and resources. Therefore this lessens the amount of pollution and the environmental impact of their production (for example, less mining or quarrying and less use of fossil fuels).

By recycling you will be helping to preserve natural resources (trees, oil, minerals etc), which helps protect the environment for you and future generations.

Recycling diverts rubbish from landfill sites. Currently any waste you throw away and do not recycle, is buried in a landfill site.

By recycling you do your bit for the environment, just remember that the important thing is to do your best, do what you can.

Last year the Vale of Glamorgan Council received around 60,000 tonnes of waste, this figure does not include commercial waste. Every year this amount increases. Unfortunately most of this waste is sent landfill sites.

There are many problems with sending waste to landfill:

Landfill sites are filling up quickly, they produce methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas,
Discarding materials that could be recycled is a waste of finite resources,
The average person in a lifetime will throw away 600 times their adult weight in rubbish. This means that each adult will leave a legacy to their children of 40,000 kg of waste.

What is Waste Recycling ?

The definition of recycling is to pass a substance through a system that enables that substance to be reused. Waste recycling involves the collection of waste materials and the separation and clean-up of those materials. Recycling waste means that fewer new products and consumables need to be produced, saving raw materials and reducing energy consumption.

Unfortunately in Wales, the household and commercial sectors have relatively low recycling rates.